


Home From Sea

by Ankaret



Series: A Wand With Sixteen Strings [3]
Category: Harry Potter - Rowling, Marlow series - Forest
Genre: Crossover, Multi, aw16siverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:41:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 37,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/28534">A Wand With Sixteen Strings</a>, set eight years later in a Wizarding World at war.  Adventure story / romantic comedy / tale of wizardly derring-do, with fish, Flobberworms, centaurs, and a brief visit to a Wizarding wedding.</p><p>Written between OOTP and HBP; I'm not planning to go back and make it HBP and DH-compliant.  Warning for beloved HP characters dying offstage, and one who I don't think anyone loves but me dying on screen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"You are being an idiot," Rowan Marlow remarked kindly to her sister.

Ten-year-old Nicola would have glared at her and stumped tearlessly off. Thirteen-year-old Nicola would have minded desperately but been petrified that someone might _notice_ her minding. Sixteen-year-old Nicola would have flung herself off out of the house and not come back until dusk, and thank heaven _that_ phase was over and that Nicola, unlike Ginty, had never been prone to exorcising her muddled feelings by tiring out some poor horse.

Nineteen-year-old Nicola continued unpacking clothes, briskly and neatly, from the big suitcase that lay on the padded window-seat. The light poured in, uninterruptedly grey-silver all the way from the sea. Rowan reflected that she and Nicola were the only members of the family who actually bothered to pack things with some consideration of the time it would save at the other end.

"It's all very well for you. You're not wandering around with Lawrie's face on," Nicola eventually said in a bruised voice.

"I might as well be," said Rowan caustically. "Does it not occur to you, my little one, that none of the rest of us ended up with chestnut hair, green eyes or any other noticeable departure from the family norm _either_? Because it occurs to me. Frequently. And considering the amount of time Father dearest spent steaming off to foreign ports and the way Kay's man somehow never managed to dredge up a bit of the farm log saying _This day ane owle did arrive bearing messages for mine elder son Geoffry, but we did wring the neck of the buggre_... well, it's made me give every blond wizard I've ever met a long considering glance, I can tell you."

"Chestnut hair and _brown_ eyes, and anyway, that was Gin," said Nicola, not remarking on the fact that even eighteen months after his death Edwin Dodd still only got mentioned as _Kay's man_. "And what price Harry Marlow, sitting on the roof of the Shippen conversing with the Devil?"

"Is that what he did? _Accio_ decanter," said Rowan, put her hand out to catch it and poured Nicola a glass. "Drink it. I know you don't like it. Drink it anyway. And consider that this isn't the first time the family face has been an inconvenience and it _certainly_ won't be the last, and you may as well get used to it."

Nicola shook her head. The ends of her yellow hair wagged to and fro where they escaped from the knot at the nape of her neck. "How isn't it the first time?"

"Don't you remember that nasty business back at Hogwarts when those idiots Bole and Derrick started spreading rumours about Ginty? Perhaps it was before your time, at that,"

"What?" said Nicola, intrigued despite herself. "Oh, go on, Ro. It's been _years_. You must have got over the school-was-a-tiresome-interlude-in-my-wonderful-life pose by now."

Rowan blinked, and reminded herself that she never thought much of elder-to-younger haughtiness when she ran into it from Giles or Kay. Besides, there was always the chance that when Nicola said _wonderful life_ she wasn't actually being sarcastic. Perhaps the wretched child thought that running Trennels, with everything that entailed in both the mundane and the wizarding worlds, actually was something more than tedium spiked with uncomfortably frantic activity.

It was more the sort of thing one expected of Lawrie, but one never knew; particularly as Nicola had chosen to make a living in the Navy, which was rather an example of punctuated equilibrium itself. Rowan drank the glass of Firewhiskey. She had a feeling that by the end of the conversation she would need it.

"Oh, they got the idea that Ginty was part Veela and she was silly enough to encourage it. Unfortunately they also had a grasp of the principles of heredity that I suppose I shouldn't have found so surprising, considering how closely they both resemble the Slytherin ancestral ape, and Peter in particular had an unpleasant time of it before I thought to track them down and be very particularly squashing." Rowan gave a brief, fierce smile like sunlight lancing down through grey clouds.

Nicola unfolded some dire-looking slacks and stared at them as if she couldn't think how she'd come to own them in the first place. "That isn't the same thing at all."

"Isn't it?" asked Rowan lightly, leaning back against the window-frame and crossing her arms across her thin chest. She was too thin altogether, and the mist-coloured sweater and tatty jeans she was wearing did nothing to disguise it. _Just gone back to running a farm, proper occupation for a Muggleborn after all, I keep up the quotas and don't you bother me_ was what it said to any passing Knight of Walpurgis, just like the worn clasp on the string of pearls around her neck said _breeding but no money_ to the local hunting gentry.

The _other_ hunting gentry. The ones who turned up in the daytime to bore her about the Countryside Alliance, as opposed to the ones who arrived after dark and whispered 'Alohomora' at the door.

"No. It isn't," said Nick finally.

"I suppose it's not. Ginty was a little idiot, but it's not as if she was... oh, pretending to be a Veela to make a point about only humans being allowed wands, or something."

Nicola blinked at her, eyelashes spiky. It might just have been clear mascara, though Rowan had never pinned any of her sisters for the clear mascara type. "If you mean that society for liberating the house-elves, Gin only joined it for half a term and _that_ was only because she was friends with Unity..."

Nicola stopped, and carried on in a constrained voice. "With Unity Logan. _She's_ in the Daily Snitch as well, though she doesn't get as many pages as Lawrie. There's a photo of her - it's been badly touched up to make her look like she's got a neck - and an interview on the Womens' Page. All about what a confidential job she has as secretary to that git Avery and what a confidential job _he_ has as secretary to the Wizengamot and how he's working himself into an early grave." She scowled. "Someone else's, I should imagine."

Rowan shook her head. "Never mind Unity Logan, or the house-elves either. Haven't you considered that this kind of thing just might have happened once or twice before in theatrical circles?"

"Don't swank, Ro," said Nicola crossly. "What d'you mean, theatrical circles?"

Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Several sets of footsteps, all of them entirely too cautious to be Mrs Bertie dusting or Rose Dodd popping in to show off her latest tarty purchase in the way of clothes or eye-makeup and complain about her stepmother.

Rowan put a hand up to Nicola for silence. She slid her wand along the bookcase to where it could be easily reached but didn't look suspicious. She took a small breath, and opened the door.

She found herself looking up into the face of her younger brother Peter. It always took her a moment to adjust to Peter's face being all the way up there. She still vaguely expected it to be bobbing around at elbow-height. Peter had grown from a stocky child to a gangling adolescent to a tall, solid twenty-year-old. Rowan was more than half convinced he'd done it to avoid being the right shape for Giles's castoffs, ever.

She hadn't been expecting Peter. She certainly hadn't been expecting Peter looking grimy and rueful, with two exhausted witches and a wizard with a baby on his hip following him up the stairs. She opened her mouth to say something, shut it again, and beckoned them in.

Nicola was not so restrained. "_Peter!_ What are you doing here?"

"Exactly what I'd like to ask," said Rowan fiercely. "Nick - make yourself useful, pass the Firewhiskey, it looks like everyone needs one. Peter, what possessed you to bring them here in broad daylight?"

Nicola poured Firewhiskey and offered it round. The elder of the two witches shook her head and waved it away. She looked white and tense, as if meeting new people was the final thing she couldn't cope with on top of whatever had happened to her already. The younger witch nodded, took two glasses and started saying "Mum... come on, Mum, it'll do you good," in a voice Nicola was startled to find herself recognising. "Hannah Abbott?"

"Oh... Nicola," said Hannah tiredly. "This is my Mum, and this is Mr Perkins who used to work at the Ministry. Before."

"Take them down to the kitchen and give them some food," said Rowan briskly. "Peter - again - why -"

Peter squared his shoulders under his guernsey. "Because the alternative was leaving them on top of Rum Beacon where we Apparated in, with a fog coming down and no one to keep an eye on them but Fob. Or else sending a message here by Fob and staying myself, _which_ you wouldn't have liked either."

"Too right I wouldn't. Fob is eleven!"

"Fob," said Peter grimly, "was the one who came to tell me that we couldn't hide out in Bacca Cave like usual, because her sister Rose had ever-so-helpfully chosen that precise point to spread a blanket with her new bloke the Death Eater,"

Mrs Abbott squeezed her daughter's hand, hard. Hannah looked, if possible, even more exhausted. The baby started crying. Nicola hastily ushered them downstairs towards the kitchens, feeling equal parts of embarrassment and being glad to have something to do, even if it was acting as head-cook-and-bottlewasher.

She tried to make cheerful conversation at the same time as making omelettes, but it was obvious none of them were having it. Mr Perkins clasped his hands in the lap of his robe and answered with distant brightness as if it was a job interview. Mrs Abbott sounded as if talking to a stranger was the equivalent of having her soul wound out very slowly onto a spindle, and Hannah joggled the baby expertly over one arm, stared out of the window and said nothing. Nicola relapsed into silence too and eventually served omelettes. "There's some fruitcake as well - I'll go and get it - "

When she returned from the pantry Mr Perkins had spread out a Daily Snitch on the table. It was the twin of the one Nicola had binned upstairs, except that instead of being crumpled it was slightly charred round the edges. Nicola turned her back under the pretence of bolting the door. Just in case of Mrs Colthard popping in from the village for a cup of sugar, she told herself, or any similar disasters. "I'll make you thermoses of tea as well, and there's a cauldron down in the cellar you can cook on - it's not bad down there, really - have you still got your wands?"

Mr Perkins had. "Auror training," he explained with a fractional smile. The Abbotts hadn't.

Hannah gave Nicola a dour, confrontational look, and then looked down at the tiled red floor as if she found it infinitely preferable. "I'll need nappies for Grace."

Nicola wondered for a flurried moment whether nappies came into it and whether it would help to say _Honestly, no one but Ann ever bothered_ and then realised Hannah meant the baby.

Strewth, she thought, taken aback. She had assumed it was a baby Perkins. Of course, people her age _did_ have babies, but she'd always dimly associated that with Muggles with bleached hair in high ponytails standing around with pushchairs outside shops, not with the likes of Hannah. "I... um, I'll see what I can do. Kay might..."

"I heard you've been off on a Muggle boat," said Hannah flatly. "Not many Men from the Ministry out on the North Sea, I don't suppose. Three square meals a day and nothing to do but watch the seagulls. All right for some."

Nicola considered saying things like _Rowan thought it would be suspicious if all of us hung around here_ and _Well, it's not as if I could follow in Giles' footsteps like I always meant to, what with things the way they are_ and found them all, frankly, pretty pointless. She reached to the back of the cupboard and found some of the baby formula Rowan used for orphaned lambs instead. "Can you use this?"

And remembered, unbidden, Professor McGonagall saying 'Undoubtedly you _can_; the question is whether you _may_,' and Hannah withdrawing the hand she had been waving in the air and looking deflated. They'd been about fourteen at the time. Hannah looked twice that now.

She got them settled in the cellar and went back upstairs. She didn't much want to be with Rowan and Peter, but she didn't much want to be alone with her thoughts in hawkhouse or owlery or stables, either. Rowan and Peter were still arguing when she got back.

Peter was hunched in a chair, head down between his shoulders like a burly vulture. "Evil never sleeps, so they tell me, but if evil ever does get a bit of shut-eye I'd say 3.40pm was the time."

"What a shame that doesn't apply to everyone out queueing for their shopping or off to fetch their children home from the Colebridge Grammars," said Rowan bitingly.

An owl tapped at the window. Nicola resignedly opened it and let it in. It looked like Ginty's owl. "It's for you, Ro."

Peter went to read over his sister's shoulder. "Honestly are you sure it's not Nick in the Snitch everyone says it looks like her... Rowan, what _is_ this about?"

"This," said Nicola coldly, retrieving the paper from the bin and spreading it out on top of the table with the flat of her hand. The headline read _BELOVED IDOL TO WED CENTAUR_ and the smaller paragraph headings were _Prima Donna_, _Permits_ and _Polyjuice???!!!_.

Under the headline was a photograph of Lawrie, her short, spiky, expensively cut hair studded with small flowers. She was alternately beaming, looking up mistily into the camera, and turning to kiss her fiance's cheek.

"Blow me down," said Peter cheerfully. "It does look like Nick."

"It - does - not!"

"It does," said Rowan, studying the picture. "And if you had half the sense you were born with you'd see that that was a _good_ thing. That's not Lawrie in love with Patroklos, that's Lawrie doing an impression of _you_ being in love with Patroklos."

Nicola crimsoned and sat down. She felt the blood thump in her ears. She wondered whether she was having a heart attack, and thought probably not; she couldn't be that lucky.

"Am not," she said in a small distant voice. Distant as the North Sea, where she really wished she still was at the moment. At the very bottom, for preference, fathoms deep and smothered in silt. "I... We're just not. That's all."

"Well, I'll bet you he and Lawrie _just aren't_ either, because, and I can't believe you've never noticed this, _our sister Lawrie is as bent as a relief map of Knockturn Alley and as far as I can tell always has been_,"

Nicola stared at her, bereft of speech.

"I don't know what she's up to this time," Rowan continued, "but I suspect it's got a lot to do with securing a certain centaur a place in the limelight where the Ministry can't off him without Questions being Asked, and a lot _more_ to do with covering up her real tracks, whatever they are. And before you ask, I don't know, and don't much want to. Having the house occasionally cluttered up with Peter's taste in women is bad enough." She paused, looked at Peter, and said in an altogether different tone of voice, "Binks, you're bleeding."

"It's quite all right, the guernsey soaks it up," he said with a bad attempt at insouciance.

"It is not quite all right!" said Rowan, sounding for once in her life a lot like her sister Karen. "Here, take that _off_ \- you'd better put a potion on it, you _must_ be too old to pull the _but it's purple and stings_ line by now..."

Nicola took the opportunity to escape at least as far as the window and to stare out at the drive. "There's someone coming," she said detachedly. "In a carriage. I think it must be Men from the Ministry."

Rowan swore. "Oh, damn, the milk quotas..."

"Milk quotas?" said Nicola, thinking it had to be a mistake. It was bad enough that she could feel a great clotted tangle of feelings squatting bezoar-like in her stomach, worse that Peter was wounded. Things would turn to farce if Rowan added milk quotas.

"Things the Ministry are good at, spreading faceless terror. Things that the Ministry are really very bad at, running a country by proxy," said Rowan crisply. "You haven't been told _only registered customers_ yet in a shop?"

"I didn't know things had got that bad,"

"Well, they have. Peter, you can't be here, you'd better Floo out, and _go somewhere you can get that looked at_. Nick, come with me, they'll want to check your papers..."

Nicola thought about saying that she'd really much rather stay here, even with the Daily Snitch mocking her from the wastebasket, and then realised that Rowan wanted moral support. This alone was surprising enough to propel her meekly towards the front door.

Lawrie... Well, she had to admit it made sense, from Margaret Jessop onwards. She couldn't bring herself to feel much about it. She couldn't really see that it was any of her business. It was _Lawrie_, that was all.

Nicola clenched one hand in her pocket. Lawrie and Patroklos, though...

_She shouldn't have. She's older than Ginty was when... She knew._ Or then again, being Lawrie, maybe she didn't. Nicola couldn't decide whether either possibility offered any comfort. She thought about composing a Howler, but the idea of Lawrie and Patroklos opening it together was in the blank realms of the unfaceable.

She would just have to go to London, that was all, and sort it out. Rowan looked back over her shoulder at her with wry exasperation. "Oh, take that look off your face, you look like an Ancient Briton who's just trodden in her last pot of woad. It's hugely unlikely that Lois Sanger's traipsing about the countryside inspecting milk quotas. And if she is it serves her right, the depressing female."

"Do I really look like an Ancient Briton?" asked Nicola, making an effort to be distracted.

"No. Saxon all the way. Chalk up another curse to the family face," said Rowan, and opened the door to the Men from the Ministry.


	2. Chapter 2

Lawrie Marlow made faces at herself in the mirror as the Polyjuice wore off. It was a habit she had never grown out of, though these days she wrote it off as exercises. Her face shrank from swarthy, long-nosed and lantern-jawed back to small, pale and pointed, and a scar under her left eye rolled itself neatly up like a caterpillar and fell off.

Lawrie considered herself. It was a pity, she thought, that she couldn't at least keep the nose. Or the skin tone. She'd always envied Padma, with that smooth nutmeg skin. It had _smelt_ like nutmeg, as well, just at the curve of her jaw at the soft shadowed point where earring brushed skin. She remembered the moment that particular smell slipped over into her sensual memory, instead of vaguely reminding of her of soap and rice pudding.

Well, that was a long time ago and no regrets on either side. Not, actually, that she'd asked.

She looked around for the Polyjuice Potion on her dressing-table, which was covered with the cannibalised remains of at least three expensive matching sets of pots and bottles; one blue enamel, one red and gold gilt, and one smothered with a monogram that conveniently ended in M. Eventually she spotted the small green glass bottle gleaming between a naked cake of pressed foundation and a perfume bottle with a lovely old-fashioned bulb atomiser that she'd rather thought she'd given away a birthday ago to her sister Ginty.

Lawrie crossed the small room and opened the door a fraction. Her dressing-room had a small fire sulking in the grate; it barely produced enough heat to stir the marabou trim on the robe hanging over the folding screen, but she knew for a fact that the only thing heating the rest of the house was a Ministry-issue brazier in the kitchen. "Ginevra!"

Her secretary came hurrying up the bare-looking stairs, her cotton-reel-like heels clicking on the drugget. She was perhaps a year younger than Lawrie, with thick red hair that was held back from her foxy, intelligent face with what looked like a bulldog clip. An aggressively hand-knitted nubbly green cardigan hung around her shoulders. "Yes?"

"Tell Props from me that I know what Bosola looks like, and it's not a concussed Erumpent. They must have put too much Boomslang skin in again."

"What _does_ he look like, then?"

Not for the first time, Lawrie wished she was a Metamorphmagus. She made an expressive face instead. Ginevra, a quick-thinking young woman, retrieved a Muggle cardboard camera from one drooping pocket and took a photo.

"Oi," said Lawrie, wishing she'd thought of it herself.

"Well, I can't just go back and tell them we're _another_ batch of Polyjuice down and they'll just have to guess what wants changing. It's a controlled substance, you know. There's forms to fill in. There's _quotas_. And don't you start quoting to me about not being confined within the weak list of a country's fashion, I get enough of that from Tim."

"Quotas. You sound like my sister Rowan," said Lawrie instead.

"Never met the woman," said Ginevra briskly. "By the time I got to Hogwarts she'd gone, remember? And I never could tell any of your relatives apart except for Peter, because he was the one who came visiting. Do you want your owl post?"

Lawrie did. It contained the usual stuff. A clipping of a review from some Australian magazine called _Sorcery Southern Cross_, a four-page letter in mad spiky green lettering from someone signing themselves _Disgusted Arithmancer, Wigan_, another letter in mad _purple_ ink from someone who had spent entirely too much time thinking about human-centaur relations, four letters of congratulation from people she barely remembered, six declarations of love, one declaration that her engagement to Patroklos was really a coded acceptance of her _real_ engagement to the writer of the letter but could she go back to communicating via the clues in the _Practical Puffskein Breeder_ crossword in future as her TRUE BETROTHED didn't always get the Daily Snitch, a careful letter in alternate yellow and black letters on paper decorated with bumblebees from someone called Caroline Millett asking which subject had been her favourite when she was in Hufflepuff, a letter from her goblin accountant and an invitation to lunch.

Lawrie read the letter from the accountant attentively and turned over the invitation to lunch. It was written in flowing gold script on lilac paper.

She carefully bundled up the post in her arms and traipsed downstairs to the office. It was cold. The grate was dauntingly empty, and there was a hole stuffed with rag in the corner of one of the high sash windows.

Ginevra was waving her wand at an ancient typewriter that looked like the bastard offspring of a black-leaded range, a piano and a tank. The typewriter chattered back at her, typing wildly at nothing. Ginevra managed the proper flick of the wand. The typewriter gave one last convulsive clatter of its space bar and subsided into sulky silence.

Lawrie would have applauded if she'd had a free hand. Ginevra was a much more accomplished witch than she was. Then again, Lawrie had hired her on the understanding that unwelcome visitors would be very competently hexed.

"_Ruddy_ thing! It's trying to write the Great Wizarding Novel again."

Lawrie dumped the post on top of the filing cabinet. "What set it off this time?"

"God knows. One minute I was typing _Thank you for your kind offer of two months in _Black As He's Painted: The Regulus Black Musical_ at the End Of The Pier Theatre_ and the next it was off onto snowy bosoms and something that looked like _his panting lamp_."

"Nasty," Lawrie waved the letter from the accountant. It was signed with a particularly gnarled thumbprint in what looked like earwax. "Can you type me up a letter to Yobdrib? Oh, and Gilderoy's asked me to lunch."

"Glory be! That'll make the ration coupons stretch farther," said Ginevra, looking relieved. "What's he want?"

"To call me his Muse and tell me how badly his book's coming along, I expect. Maybe we could sell him the typewriter. They could collaborate." Lawrie regarded the typewriter, which leapt an inch into the air and landed on the desk again with a noise like a tram-crash.

"It's got its uses. At least it's too big for anyone to break in and carry it away, unless they've thought to bring a troll." Ginevra frowned and waved her wand at the broken window. "Oh. _Reparo_... I'll go and tell the kitchen you won't want lunch. I just hope the food's good. I don't know why you put up with that old bore. He nearly got me _killed_, you know, him and his cowardly antics."

Lawrie went over and put an arm round her shoulder. The typewriter took the opportunity to ding its carriage return and poke her painfully in the hip with a solid knob of Bakelite. "Um... chin up, old lady," she said hopefully. She really wasn't very good at this kind of thing, having always regarded the world as being there to sling an arm round _her_ shoulders and murmur things at the psychological moment, rather than the other way round.

"I know he's a sad case, and I know all he actually wants me to do is sit on the couch in his dreary flat for hours whilst he talks about his life and calls me Ganymede, and I know his being in love with me is really only a sort of pretending..."

Ginevra gave a convulsive little shake of her shoulders. It was clear that the arm around her shoulders wasn't doing any good but just lying there like an unreceived parcel. Lawrie took it away again and retreated. She kept a baleful eye out for the typewriter. Ginevra blew her nose. "Then why do either of you bother?"

"Because I know it's pretending and so does he, but if neither of us _say_ anything... Well, it's like a house of cards, or one of those spun sugar sculpture things. It's interesting for its own sake, even if it's full of air."

"I really don't understand how your head works," said Ginevra in a muffled way from the depths of the hanky.

Lawrie was used to people saying that kind of thing, so she just said "Few do," and did a quiet tap-dance until Ginevra pulled herself together.

"Don't talk about sugar sculptures," said Ginevra eventually in a voice of determined cheerfulness. "I haven't seen my own sweet ration in months, I give it to Mum for the nieces and nephews and hope she snatches some chocolate on the quiet. They run her ragged. They keep threatening her with evacuees, as well, I don't know where she's going to put them... Bring us back a bag of petit fours if you can swing it."

"I'll stuff my handbag with profiteroles," promised Lawrie lavishly.

"Be careful. I heard Doris Crockford got banned from the Leaky Cauldron for trying to smuggle out a scuttleful of coal in her hat."

"She'd have done better to burn the hat," said Lawrie callously. "And that horrible bag she carries her knitting in. Click, click, click, from the stalls, I kept wondering whether they'd written in a part for an Animagus death-watch beetle." She perched herself on one corner of the desk. "Ready? No, we're not going to feed you pink paper, you horrible thing... Dear Yobdrib and all at Golden Mead-Hall Financial Management. With regard to my investment..."

It was cold in the streets, a fact which all of the Muggles appeared to be celebrating by standing about looking squalid in cheap synthetics. It was even colder by the time Lawrie reached Diagon Alley, and as she tapped on the wall of the Leaky Cauldron it started snowing.

Diagon Alley was nearly empty. A witch hurried by carrying something that was either a broken broom or a very small bundle of firewood; a glowering wizard marched up and down in a sandwich-board reading 'Try Our Frostbite Tincture - It'd Charm The Warts Off A Troll' and two hags were crouched by a brazier on which they were heating some things that probably, on the whole, weren't chestnuts.

Snow beaded the fur collar of Lawrie's cloak. She passed the cauldron shop, which had a large card in the window reading 'Copper and Pewter Salvage Regulation 419b Now In Effect - Be A Straight Shooter, Hoard Old Pewter. By order of the Ministry of Magic.' She crossed the road and knocked on an elaborately gabled door that looked as if its spiritual home was a giant cuckoo-clock.

A small hatch flapped open in the door. "Password," snapped someone from inside.

"What do you do if people say sherbet bloody lemon, poke your wand through the door and Obliviate them?" asked Lawrie. She passed a small bag of coins through the hatch. "Here's your password."

There was a brief chomping noise. "Proper gold," said the voice, sounding satisfied. "You wouldn't believe what I've been through with my teeth, what with the run on fake Galleons lately. Lead plays hell with my molars. You got a reservation?"

"Table for two, name of Lockhart," said Lawrie briskly.

"Oh, old Violet Drawers. Tell 'im if he tries giving me an autograph instead of a tip again I'll bite his nose off," said the voice sarcastically. "Right you are, miss."

The door opened into something resembling the inside of a very upmarket chocolate-box. Except that it was warm enough to melt the chocolate, for which Lawrie was very grateful. There was enough red padding and gold ormolu and mirrors and gilt twiddles about the place to equip any three brothels and an upmarket teashop, and the window was heart-shaped and looked out onto a view of French lavender fields. A tall blond wizard was studying a menu. He wore turquoise robes that clashed horribly with the decor.

"Ganymede! Deity! Nymph!" he breathed in deep, thrilling tones, hurrying across the room to slide Lawrie's cloak off her shoulders. "Ravishing snow-maiden! I remember once when I was caught in a blizzard between Kalinin and Kaluga... no, it's gone." He pulled out a chair for her. "What will you have?" he asked tenderly, holding the menu in front of her with one thumb casually over the Hippocampus steak and the lobster.

He continued to hold forth disjointedly about the travels he couldn't quite remember until Lawrie had finished her creme brulee and was babyishly licking the spoon. Feeling that it had to be her turn by now, she began "You wouldn't believe what Props did to my Polyjuice this morning..." and realised that Gilderoy Lockhart was no longer sitting opposite her.

Instead, he appeared to be kneeling on the carpet. Lawrie looked down in puzzlement.

He looked up at her with crystal-blue eyes. _That_ was what she needed for Bosola, she thought as she looked at his broad unwrinkled brow and the small lines that cupped his eyelids; that intensity, that weariness, that sense of a man whose mental puzzle-box was missing several crucial bits...

"I have come to save you from the biggest mistake of your life!" Gilderoy declared passionately, taking her hand and kissing it. "I can no longer sit idly by. I must speak! I have loved you since you were a little girl. Not that you seem any older now," he added with a roguish twinkle. "I remember how I tended your cut hand, how my eyes filled with tears of pride when you gained fifty points for Hufflepuff..."

"Both of those were Nick, and so was knocking your colour-change contact lens sideways during Duelling Club."

"I don't remember that," said Gilderoy rather more quickly than normal. "Dearest Ganymede, you must allow me to know you better than you know yourself!"

"I don't think I must," said Lawrie, trying to repossess her hand. She wondered hysterically whether he was referring to an obscure one-woman show she'd once done at the Speculum Sisterhood Theatre in Streatham.

"You must allow me to tell you that whatever you may feel for this misguided young centaur, it will not last. I have made an extensive study of magical creatures, you know, and _centaurs always turn vicious_. You need not fear, you have me to protect you from his dark advances - or, at least, to whisk you away on a whirlwind voyage to somewhere he can never reach. My books still sell very well in Trondheim, so I hear."

Lawrie stared at him blankly, wondering whether he was still talking about Streatham. He reached into his pocket and proffered a small velvet box. "Marry magical me!"

Lawrie saw her cue and took it. "Oh, Gilderoy, this is so sudden," she gasped, fighting a terrible desire to drum her heels on the floor and giggle.

"_Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls!_" he breathed ardently in the intervals of nuzzling the base of her thumb. "_Come hither, the dances are done,  
In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls,  
Queen lily and rose in one;   
Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls,   
To the flowers, and be their sun._"

Lawrie squirmed back in her seat. "It isn't any good, Gilderoy," she said kindly. "You know as well as I do that you're really not interested in the rosebud garden of girls. Besides, I'm Muggleborn. I know you didn't actually write that."

He rocked back on his heels and grinned at her, brushing a stray golden curl off his brow. "Well, yes, but I thought you of all people would appreciate the old-fashioned performance with trimmings. Besides, _couldn't_ we make a go of it? You obviously need publicity, or you wouldn't be getting hitched to a horse. I need publicity, because my public is shamefully fickle - I haven't been in Witch Weekly in months, and then it was just a horrible picture on their 'War Locks' page that they took of me out buying a hairnet. Don't you think we should give it a try? Someone to come home to, someone to share a laugh with when the world's put a tear in your eye? Separate bedrooms, of course."

"Where are you getting that twinkly-eyed act from?" asked Lawrie with academic interest. "It's not Albus Dumbledore... Do the thing with your hair again."

"Oh, _Ganymede_." He shook his head winningly. "So fair and cold and young. He'll be no good for you, you know."

"You can come along to the wedding and look moody and dashing, then, and revolve round with the bridesmaids whilst giving me heart-rending looks over their shoulders," offered Lawrie. "That ought to be good for a photograph in Witch Weekly, at least." She considered, and gave a small, cat-with-creamy smile. "Actually, considering that I bet Peter will be busy being Patroklos' best man and I have _no_ idea where Giles is... do you want to give me away?"

"Ah, but you were never mine to give," he said, clasping a hand over where his heart presumably resided under the turquoise robes; but he got up off his knees, and joined Lawrie in considering the question of liqueur coffees.

Lawrie returned, feeling warm and replete enough to smile at the snowflakes and make childish patterns in the dusting of snow on the ground with her feet. She found Ginevra making stilted conversation with her sister Nicola. For some reason they'd never liked each other much. Ginevra said "_Here_ she is," in tones of deep relief, and scarpered.

Nicola looked at Lawrie. Lawrie looked at Nicola. Despite the furs huddled at Lawrie's neck and the snow sticking to her spiky hair, and the way Nicola's hair was straight and shining and falling over the collar of her Muggle tweed coat, they were still, very obviously, twins. They drew their fair brows down and stared at each other, Nicola in fury and Lawrie in rather well-rehearsed bewilderment.

"Come upstairs. There's a fire," said Lawrie, getting the first word in, something that rarely happened when she met Nicola. "I'll explain."

"You'd better, buster," said Nicola ferociously.

"So," explained Lawrie airily, jiggling a very small china cup on her knee, "I thought, since you and Patroklos obviously weren't getting on with it..."

"_Weren't getting on with it?_"

"... and since it'd be a bit noticeable if I disappeared..."

"Oh, it wouldn't be that noticeable at all," said her sister, baring her teeth. "I bet if I murdered you right now no one would notice but Ginny..."

"Ginevra, she prefers these days,"

"... and she probably wouldn't care as long as someone carried on paying her wages. What the _hell_ do you think you're doing, you and Patroklos?"

"_Listen_. You - being me - marry Patroklos and skip off on honeymoon. You'd like that," said Lawrie, speaking as if to one of the infant Weasleys who occasionally infested the office when there was no one but Ginevra to mind them. "Wandering about under olive groves and talking about old books and grooming those ruddy hawks of yours to fly off and mug the local wildlife. And meanwhile, Lawrence S. Marlow slips off, crafty-like, to help Peter smuggle wizards to the coast." Lawrie frowned as if that ought to mean something to her, then shrugged and leaned back triumphantly in her squashy armchair. The warm firelight cupped the dramatic bones of her face. "Brilliant, aren't I?"

"You are the most..." Nicola shook her head. "You don't _like_ anything in the way of adventures. You always start saying _never again_ before we're a third of the way in. Why this fit of the heroics all of a sudden?"

Lawrie looked aggravatingly wise. "That'd be _telling_..."

"Is it someone you want to see safe?"

Lawrie continued to look as nonchalant as possible. "_Could_ be."

"Lal, _tell_ me, or I'll... I'll report you both to the Ministry on grounds of misprision of marriage."

"What's that?" asked Lawrie, impressed.

"I don't know. Edwin mentioned it once. I always thought it sounded like misplacing your marriage license. Tell me, or I won't have anything to do with any of this."

"So you _are_ thinking about it!" Lawrie crowed.

"I - am - not. I think the whole idea's ridiculous. I just want to know what's going on in your tiny crafty mind,"

"They can Disappear you. They can Disappear Peter. But they can't Disappear me unless they Obliviate everyone who's ever sent me fan mail," said Lawrie firmly. "That's what. I'm the obvious one to help."

"Stone me," said Nicola and finished her coffee in one gulp. "You're being _practical_."

"I'm always practical."

"No, you're not," Nicola frowned darkly. "That was a really nasty trick, you know,"

"Sorry," said Lawrie, not noticeably contrite. "Petit four?"

"No. Does Patroklos... does he know what you're up to?"

"Why don't you ask him?"

"I can see I'm going to have to," Nicola stood up decisively, nearly knocking over the firescreen with her elbow. "Lal, tell me who it is and what they've done to get the Ministry on their tail. I told you, I won't help unless you do. I'll make sure it _doesn't_ happen, if it comes to that."

Lawrie squinched herself back in the chair and attempted to look orphaned and young. "You _Ann_, you!"

"If you like," Nicola stood over her. "_Tell_ me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quotation from _Maud_ by Alfred Lord Tennyson.


	3. Chapter 3

"They used to call themselves the Order of the Phoenix,"

"Why?" asked Phoebe Dodd, generally known as Fob. She was a downright young person with a square, boyish face and a general air of being the solid fulcrum about which the universe turned. Or, at least, that part of the universe that interested Fob, which was pretty much bounded by the railway line on one side and the outskirts of Streweminster on the other. At present, she was lying on her stomach on the hearthrug in her step-aunt Rowan's bedroom, eating homemade biscuits.

"Oh, _Fob_, how would I know? Probably because every now and again they'd self-combust, and when they reappeared they'd have this touchingly childlike _well, nobody could possibly still be holding a grudge about last time, so you're up for risking your life and the safety of all your dependents again, right?_ expression on their soot-stained little faces. Kingsley was always particularly good at that one." Rowan thought about it. "Perhaps it was because it was harder to see the soot."

"_Rowan_!" said Fob, looking properly shocked.

"The _metaphorical_ soot, Fob."

Fob looked up under her stumpy lashes in a perfect imitation of her Aunt Lawrie and drawled "I don't like metaphors. They spit at me."

Rowan laughed. "Finish your biscuit and then for heaven's sake get on with your homework," She frowned at her papers. "I'm _sure_ the vet was in last week to treat the latest outbreak of mastitis, but the bill's just for the usual..."

Fob looked up alertly, ranking mastitis considerably higher than homework in the scheme of things. She scrambled ungracefully over to take a look. "_Oh_. That wasn't the vet. Ted bought a couple of boxes of antibiotics off a man with a van who came round Thursday. Cash on the nail and no questions asked. It was the same stuff as usual but the boxes were in Dutch."

Rowan considered using an Unforgivable Curse on her cowman, or possibly her step-niece. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"You were up in the High Field sorting out the winter wheat, and about time too. I'd have done it the week before. Though I know you were busy then with the pigs," added Fob kindly. "By the time you got back I'd forgotten. And _anyway_, Peter told me not to worry you."

"I was up in the High Field. You forgot. Peter told you not to worry me. Never give three excuses when one will do," said Rowan mordantly. "What do you _mean_, Peter told you not to worry me? Did Peter know about this?"

Fob scratched her ear and looked vague. "No, he meant just in general, I think..."

Rowan suppressed several tart comments about officious younger brothers. She knew from experience that the normally unflusterable Fob would only get agitated and then stubborn, and none of it would lead to peace or balanced accounts.

She had vaguely expected Fob's crush to burn itself out when Peter first started bringing girlfriends home. It hadn't. Fob at eleven was as faithful as ever, fixed on the twenty-year-old Peter like her lode star. She did tend to plant herself on the stairs and stare at visiting girlfriends like all of the dogs in _The Tinder-Box_, and then, if not watched, pick up their cases and carry them off to the least convenient room in the house; but Peter had such abominable taste in women _anyway_ that Rowan found herself willing to listen to complaints of chimneys that smoked and windows that didn't shut in the interests of getting rid of the visitors quicker.

"I'm finished," said Fob deeply. "Apart from the areas of rectangles. There's no point to areas of rectangles. Have you needed to know the area of a rectangle, ever, since you left school?"

"We did Arithmancy. It was a little different."

"Oh." Fob ate the last of her biscuits. "So what happened to the Order of the Phoenix, then?"

"Dead, dead, Azkaban, Azkaban, St. Mungo's, and I haven't seen Remus Lupin in years," said Rowan rapidly, finding herself unable to go over the dreary details of it or, worse, answer Fob's questions. She had always believed that there was a balance-point in life where talking about depressing events became much worse than actually going through them, and she seemed to have hit this one like a brick wall. "If you're finished, you can go and take the rest of those biscuits down to the Abbotts and Mr Perkins."

Fob wrinkled her short nose. "It smells like a nappy-bucket down there and Hannah snaps at me. Give me newborn lambs any day. Or piglets."

Rowan stood up and stretched. She was rather uneasily aware that _it smells like a nappy-bucket over there and Karen snaps at me_ had been one of her main reason for avoiding her sister when Fob's half-siblings were very young. Then again, there had been other reasons. "Don't say things like that. I don't think I'm caught up on sleep from the _last_ batch of lambing. Shoo."

Fob galumphed off down the stairs.

Rowan reflected that she had never been thankful enough that all of her younger sisters from Ann down to Lawrie had been on the thin side. Not that she approved of the likes of Rose saying things like _Fob can't borrow my jeans because they won't fit her tractor-sized backside_. Rowan stamped, hard, on a tendril of thought that carried treacherously on: and Karen should do something about _that_, as well, no wonder the child's always round here eating biscuits...

"It's just that one of these days she'll put her great foot through my pet patch of dry rot on the stairs," she said aloud to herself, "and where's the family fender to sell to pay for it? Oh, yes, gone to buy Chocbar and Catkin. Thanks a lot, ma."

"Huh?" said Fob, reappearing at the door, pinkly out of breath. "Rowan, they've gone."

"What, the biscuits?"

"The Abbotts and Mr Perkins."

"No good deed goes unpunished," said Rowan savagely. "D'you think they've had the sense to make for Yetland Cove, or are they heading for London, I wonder? _If_ they can follow the obscure local signposting system, which I bet they can't, and... Fob, go and check the broom cupboard."

Fob went and checked the broom cupboard. "Kaykaren's old Shooting Star, your Sycamore Key, and that Comet 260 of Lawrie's that you said no one was to ride because it never got properly uncursed after that business in her third year," she reported to Rowan, who was staring dismayedly at a tea-caddy. "They took the _tea_?"

"They took the Muggle money I was saving up for renovations," said Rowan with pardonable bitterness. "Unless that was Ted Colthard buying dodgy pharmaceuticals."

"No, he took that out of petty cash."

"And those brooms were registered, too." said Rowan, staring appalled at whole new dimensions of disaster. "Let's just hope no one's patrolling around that's likely to catch them. At least there's no wizarding families nearer than the Miss Blakes at the Grange..."

Fob suddenly remembered Kay's weary injunctions about party dresses and best behaviour and being home on time. "There's Rose's Vincent."

"Oh, good _grief_, is there? Tonight?"

Fob gave an appalled nod.

Rowan pulled herself together. She murmured something and tapped Fob with her wand. "There, that should do it. Off you go home and keep an eye on him, and if you get in trouble, call me. I'll hear it. Clear?"

"As the Platonic ideal of mud," said Fob, an old family joke, but was not really surprised when Rowan only returned a preoccupied smile.

To her surprise, Fob found her sister Rose hanging about in the hallway when she arrived home. "Vincent not here yet?" she asked, banging the worst of the mud off her boots in the porch. "Maybe he's stuck in the chimney."

Rose lifted one plump shoulder and scowled sideways at her sister over it. She was sixteen, and ripely attractive, and had too much lipstick on. Fob thought with a sudden pang that Rose had had too much lipstick on ever since Daddy died and that he was never going to come back and tell her to take it off.

"He came by _broom_," Rose said witheringly.

"Where _is_ his broom?"

"What do you care? He's sitting in the drawing-room looking at photo albums with Kay," said Rose as if this was the dreggiest thing that could possibly have happened and entirely her stepmother's fault. "Would you believe they were at _school_ together? I mean, she was practically _ancient_ when he arrived, but I still think it's weird."

"Dump him, then," said Fob smartly.

Rose gave her a sour look. "Don't traipse through here in your foul socks. I don't know how you manage to get them so filthy through your boots."

"Mud, it's called. Maybe you've heard of it," said Fob in brisk imitation of Rowan. She peeled off her socks, threw them at her sister, put on a pair of disreputable slippers instead and marched into the drawing-room.

There was an extremely large, broad-shouldered young man sitting on the old chintz sofa. He exuded the same air of having trampled his surroundings into compliance as Jason, the farm bull. He was wearing black robes with an improbably clerical neckline. Fob felt almost like giggling. She had seen wizarding photographs of the family in dress robes for the ball in Nicola and Lawrie's fourth year, and privately thought that even Peter looked like all kinds of a fool wearing what was basically a dress.

Except that Rose's boyfriend Vincent didn't look like any kind of a fool. Not by the second glance, anyway. Fob registered the thick neck and the close-set eyes and the cold, glassy, sharklike grin.

"Oh, Fob, your _clothes_," said Karen weakly.

"Bit of mud never did anyone any harm," said Vincent with something that might have passed for jollity. "Like I was saying, you point out anyone you think might have had a hand in your old man's passin' away, and I'll send some of the Boys round to get the truth out of 'em, quick as you like. Anything for a friend of the family."

Karen looked distressed. Her hand tightened on the stem of her sherry-glass. "Oh... well, that's very kind, I... I was so sorry to hear about your own loss, as well. I don't remember him well, I'm afraid - a peaky little boy with a remarkable aptitude for Potions - but I do remember you were always inseparable."

Vincent shook his head slowly. "Second to him in his very first duel, I was - or would've been, if he hadn't been taken with his nerves at the last minute. He always suffered terribly with his nerves. That an' a morbid fear of anyone mentionin' the word 'ferret'. You should have seen the way his hands shook walking out towards a Quidditch match - I was a Beater, myself. All of us thought we should have caught it in time, before he... I blame myself. If only he'd been able to confide in me, he might not 've..." He made a horribly descriptive knotting motion with his huge hands. "Terrible loss to the Cause, as well, what with everything that was _expected_ of him, but we soldier on as best we can."

It occurred to Fob that hanging oneself must take a good deal of physical courage, and that surely anyone who _Karen_ noticed being good at Potions would have done something with that instead. "The Cause?" she said brightly.

"Nothin' for you to worry about," Vincent got up and stalked over to a silver-framed photograph on the dresser. He surveyed it narrowly. "This your granddad, then, Rosie?"

"No, that's my father," said Karen. Vincent took the photograph down and examined it suspiciously. "Very handsome. Very Senior Service. I suppose both your brothers are the dead spit of him?"

"Well, they're both blond, I suppose..." said Karen, rifling through photograph albums. Rose slithered back through the door and stood around by the bookcase looking truculent.

And that, thought Fob, is odd. If I had a boyfriend I wouldn't sit around staring at photos of his sisters. Well, not unless I was Auntie Lawrie, anyhow...

"Whatever are you giggling at?" asked Karen distractedly. "Go and see what the casserole's doing, Fob, and you, Rose, come and sit down with your young man."

"Kay," said Rose, looking at Karen as if she'd ruined her life by sounding unduly motherly.

"Sit _down_, Rose, and don't be tiresome. You too, Vincent, please. More sherry?"

Fob escaped into the kitchen.

There was a scratch at the back door.

Fob opened it, vaguely expecting someone from the village with a covered basket containing an off-the-coupon marrow or some eggs. Instead, she saw Mrs Abbott, clinging to the doorframe and looking bloodstained and exhausted.

"You've got a nerve coming here," Fob hissed.

"I'm terribly sorry - it was all Mr Perkins' idea - _may_ I sit down and have a cup of tea?" Mrs Abbott insinuated herself into the kitchen and sat down at the large pine table.

Fob stared at her. "No, you can't! Do you have any idea who's in the next room?"

"Oh dear, not that nice Rowan, I do feel terrible..."

"So you should, and anyway, it's not her, she's out wandering up over Colley Wood and Sidetop Hill in the dark looking for you," said Fob ruthlessly; and untruthfully, since she knew perfectly well it would be Peter out doing any looking, as Rowan would be busy with the farm rounds. "It's a Death Eater called Vincent. So there."

"What, Vincent Crabbe who was at school with Hannah? Well, I don't think he's likely to be any trouble, do you, dear? If he had two brain cells to rub together he'd have dropped one and given the other to Gregory Goyle."

"Don't bleed on the table," snapped Fob, handing her a tea-towel. "_What happened?_"

"Well, Mr Perkins kept saying that it was all an excuse about the tides and the boat from France, and the longer we stayed cooped up in your cellar the longer it gave you to betray us to the Ministry, and..."

"Oh, did he?" Fob's eyes widened and she leaned heavily against the table. It creaked. "Did he indeed. Nice Mr Perkins who somehow managed to keep his wand, huh? And then off you and Hannah and little Grace went, _on_ our registered brooms, may I add..."

"I really am sorry about that... he was terribly persuasive..."

"Yes, wizards have ways of doing that!"

"... and then somehow we ran into a cloud and there were spells going off all around us, and it was like riding through wet wool in a thunderstorm and then the broom threw me..."

"Let me guess, you were riding Lawrie's Comet 260? It's cursed."

"Oh, my goodness, her real broom? From when she was at school? Goodness gracious, what an honour... you know, if you were to auction that for charity, I'm sure... is she really going to marry Gilderoy Lockhart?"

"Fob?" called Karen.

Fob flung herself back through the kitchen door and leaned against it. "Casserole's not done yet. Ten more minutes. I'll cut some bread up, shall I?"

Karen frowned. "Perhaps I should look..."

"Yes, I expect Rose and Vincent _do_ want some time alone together in the drawing-room, what with the nice sofa and everything," said Fob desperately.

"Phoebe Jane Dodd, that is the most..." Karen shook her head. "I'll talk to you about _that_ in the morning. Yes, cut some bread up, I suppose, and who were you talking to in the kitchen?"

"The Miss Blakes' house-elf," gasped Fob, surprising herself with her own inventiveness.

"Whatever was Totty doing here?" asked Karen, frowning, as if this wasn't the first time she'd wished whichever of the hearty, hunting Miss Blakes had named their house-elf had picked something a bit less embarrassing.

"Come to say they couldn't find the jar of mushroom preserves they'd promised after all, or the port, and could she drown herself in the sink."

"I didn't ask them for any port, and there's still three jars of Fenella Blake's inedible mushroom preserve in the larder from last Christmas. I kept it in case we needed to re-point the back wall." Karen looked narrowly at her stepdaughter, then shook her head. "Never mind. I'll talk to Maud Blake in the morning. _Bread_, Fob, and turn the heat up under the casserole."

Fob flung herself back into the kitchen, where she found the fire flaring up and Mrs Abbott preparing to step into it. Mrs Abbott gave her a little wave and mouthed something.

Fob tackled her round the waist and knocked her to the floor. Mrs Abbott felt bird-thin and insubstantial, as if she was living off the marrow in her bones. They landed with a thump and a painful elbow jabbed into Fob's hip, on the dirty rag rug in front of the fire. "Are you insane? They'll have that fire watched!" panted Fob.

Mrs Abbott sat up and patted her hair indignantly. "Well, that's no way to talk to..."

Harassed footsteps approached the door. "Fob, are you all _right_ in there?" called Karen in tones that sounded less like _are you hurt at all, dear stepdaughter of my heart_ and more like _don't make me have to take you to Casualty on this night of all nights on top of everything else_.

"I dropped the breadbin. Don't _fuss_," shouted Fob desperately.

Vincent Crabbe stepped out of the fireplace.

It was a small fireplace, and he was a very large wizard, so he seemed to _unfold_ out of it like some weird long-legged beast of nightmare with shoulders the width of a smouldering Aga and hands like gravedigger's shovels.

"Polly Abbott," he said genially, offering her a hand up. "You'd be wanted by the Ministry for questioning about your daughter's whereabouts. Posters all over the place, though they don't do you justice. I do like a witch who keeps her looks. As for you, young Fob, you've helped detain a dangerous fugitive. I'll keep my eye on you. And don't think of pulling any of that _Stupefy_ nonsense, either, I'm not a bloody troll."

Fob couldn't think what to do. If she called Rowan, then Vincent would know about Rowan, and that seemed like a very bad idea. If she didn't do anything... well, Mrs Abbott had been a bloody nuisance from the start, but she didn't think _anyone_ deserved to be handed over to Vincent's Boys and their carrion justice.

Fob squared her shoulders. "She told me where the others were," she said. "I'll take you there if you like."

His eyebrows scurried together like mating beetles. "You do me a favour? Yeah, that's likely."

"Not a favour. A _bargain_. I show you where they are, and you... you don't hurt Mrs Abbott or Karen or Rose. Okay?"

He looked at her. Fob, who had spent years taking advantage of the way people made assumptions based on her squared-off build and impassive face, realised that she was being assessed by someone who had been doing exactly the same thing for much longer. She did her best to look backed-against-the-wall honest.

"You can show a couple of my Boys. I'll tell 'em not to get rough with you, long's you're telling the truth," he said finally. "I don't get my hands dirty. I'm _management_. I'm not anybody's brute squad, not any more."

Fob shrugged with a bravado that she was far from feeling. "I can drive the farm Land Rover."

"You can sit a broom in front of Baddock. It'll easily carry you both, he's a neurasthenic little squirt. Reminds me of..." Vincent scowled. Fob felt as if she was standing in a cold draught and had to guess where it came from. She had her suspicions about who Baddock reminded Vincent of, and she didn't think it was likely to be healthy for Baddock.

"What if Kay tells _Rowan, I've gone off on a broom with one of your Boys, Vincent_?" Fob asked in a loud clear voice and hoped to any power who was listening that it worked.

If magic happened, she felt no tingle of it. No cold breath stirred on her neck like the attention of God. Then again, Vincent didn't seem to notice any magic happening, either.

"I'll settle her. Wonderful things, Memory Charms. And she was always a crap Head Girl," Vincent grinned at her again. He reached out a hand and engulfed hers in it. She had expected his hand to be cold and slimy, but instead it was dry, warm and very strong. Under other circumstances it might have been comforting. On the whole, she'd sooner have had the slime.

He opened the door. Outside it smelt of cold earth and cold air, and a licking breath of smoke. Fob thought about pumpkins and winter apples and the things that were supposed to be fended off by a horseshoe at the door. The bare tops of her feet stung above the slippers. "After you, then, Mrs Abbott," said Vincent with ghastly chivalry.

_No_, Fob thought, _you idiot woman, call for help, call for Karen, make a run for the fireplace, it's got to be better than this..._ but Mrs Abbott did none of those things. She stood her ground and said in a silly bleating sort of voice "I don't think you should hurt the little girl."

Fob winced.

Vincent's smile was substantially worse than a slap across the face would have been. "I ain't going to hurt the little girl. I told you. I have people to do that for me now. Weren't you listening?" He waved a hand in a parody of someone else's gesture and ducked his head in a derisive little bow. Fob, not normally imaginative, saw the original of that gesture, mannered and mocking, belonging to someone who had once been a nervy boy of her own age with an aptitude for Potions. "Like I said. _After you_."

They went out into the cold of the night.


	4. Chapter 4

"No," said Nicola flatly. "Absolutely not. No way. I can't stand her. I never could. The only time I ever wanted to cheer Tim Keith on was when she kept doing those sketches of her. You remember, there was that _Ill met by moonlight_ one with her lighting a candle and finding a bunch of mythical beasts sitting round a table playing cribbage and looking _ever_ so put out."

"The trouble with you and Tim," said Lawrie carefully, "is you're far too alike. You both want to be the one steaming proudly ahead whilst everyone else follows the flag."

Nicola considered this and decided that it was just a typical Lawrie distraction and there was therefore no need to think about whether or not it was true. "Never mind that. I'm not going along with this crackpot plan of yours just... just so that you can rescue an even bigger crackpot. If anyone's too alike it's you and Loony Lovegood. She told me once that the Ministry was run by a bunch of disembodied brains in a tank, and she knew because she'd _seen_ them."

Lawrie cuddled herself back into the comforting rose-velvet wings of the chair. "And you want her to be Disappeared because of that, do you? You can't still be prejudiced against all Ravenclaws because of Lois," she said artfully.

Nicola hesitated, swithering between _I'm not prejudiced against Ravenclaws_ and _Don't you bring Lois Sanger into this_. She supposed it could have been worse. It could have been Lois that Lawrie was planning to rescue. "It's not because of stuff from when we were at school," she said stonily. "She's a liability. Rowan told me about that business with the Quibbler."

"Ginevra explained to me..." began Lawrie carefully.

"_Her_," said Nicola comprehensively. She sat down in the padded window-seat. Behind her, the snow piled on the outside sill of the sash-window. The sky was a thin grey, fragile as ashes. "Yes, I know all about her explanations. I'd sooner take sweets from her brothers. From what _I_ heard, Loony Lovegood knew perfectly well that the Order were sending messages through the clues in the Quibbler crossword-puzzle, and she still published that mad article about Avery being the reincarnation of Grindelwald and got the magazine shut down and everyone who wrote for it investigated."

"She'd only been running the paper two months."

"It was sheer luck," said Nicola carefully, "that none of the trails the Ministry followed out of that office led to Rowan."

There was a long silence. Nicola drank the last of her coffee. "I don't think letting her know about Trennels is a good idea. She can't be trusted."

"She already knows a bit. She knows there's _someone_ who can help her. And now she knows something, she'll sniff around until she knows the rest. That being so..." said Lawrie, peeling the unwanted pink sugar icing off the last petit four. "... wouldn't it be a damn sight better for everyone for her to be safely out of the country? Rather than, say, blundering obliviously round bits of Dorset with a half-sucked Sugar Quill behind her ear asking people questions?"

"Honestly, you're just like Peter," said Nicola, feeling back-footed and taking refuge in aggrievement. "If this was the Civil War you'd be giving kings leg-ups into oak trees all over the place and never mind the rest of us who have to cover for you."

"How much covering for us have you done these last eighteen months whilst you've been on a ship?" asked Lawrie pertinently.

Nicola narrowed her eyes. It was on her mind to remark that Lawrie's expensively urchinlike haircut and maquillage were not noticeable signs of a life spent fighting the Ministry and neither was going off and having two-hour lunches with Gilderoy Lockhart; but Lawrie, wise in the ways of family infighting, would just have taken that, rightly, as an admission of guilt. Besides, it would just end up with Lawrie finding some way in which life was unfair to her in particular and therefore Nicola owed her, because that kind of argument always did.

"Damn-blow-blast-and-bloody-hell," she said finally. "If Rowan'll play, I suppose I'll do my bit. But I bet she won't. And I still don't see why I have to be the one who goes off playing decoy-duck in a big white dress."

Lawrie widened her spikily made-up eyes annoyingly. "Because I don't _want_ to marry Patroklos," she said unanswerably. "Besides, it's a very nice dress. It's all demure."

"I can see why it wouldn't suit you, then," said Nicola swiftly. "Well, I'll go and talk to Patroklos, and then we'll see. And even if I agree to cover for you at the wedding, it doesn't mean anything."

"You carry on thinking that, m'dear," said Lawrie in a comfortable, countrified voice that Nicola thought might belong to one of the characters from The Archers. "Can you turn round? I want to see what the back of my hair's like when I'm being you."

"I hope Peter murders you and stuffs you in a cave," said Nicola savagely, rising to her feet. "I would, if I had you along on any operation of mine."

"At least that way you'd get to read your own obituaries," said Lawrie cheerfully. "I've always wanted to do that. _Dame Lawrence Marlow, beloved star of stage, screen and resistance movement..._"

\--

For the first half of her journey, Nicola had the remains of her sense of outrage to sustain her. She thought warming things like _honestly_ and _Lawrie_ and looked out of the train window, and distractedly bought a mug of hot chocolate and a cinnamon and ginger fudge cake from the witch with the trolley.

"Cheer up, my lass, worse things happen at sea," said the witch comfortably.

Nicola gave a closed-mouthed smile. Even having made an absolute bish of explaining things over the radio to someone with a tinkling Singaporean accent and no idea of the etiquette of the sea-lanes hadn't felt as bad as this.

"Here - hang about - sign this, will you?" The witch pulled out a copy of Witch Weekly with a large cake on the cover. "It's not for me, it's for my husband's niece. I only saw you the once and I said to my husband, if I wanted a lot of misery and wellies and _oh no, we've got to sell the orchard_ I'd stay at home and talk to the portrait of his great-great-grandma. At least she tells a good tale about the Rebecca Riots when she's been at the sauce from that set of framed _Sankey's Frog Ale Is Good For You_ posters on the stairs."

"I'm not Lawrie Marlow, I'm her sister," said Nicola resignedly.

"Oh. I saw your hair was different, but I thought you'd just been at it with the Sleekeasy's." The witch wiped her hands on her apron. "Just between us now, don't you think it's a funny business, her marrying the back half of a horse?"

"I suppose it'll help if she ever goes into pantomime," said Nicola, sipping her hot chocolate. The mug was heavy earthenware, glazed a slippery green, with a froggy goblin face on one side that kept making faces at her.

"Not as if any of them have ever been any help to us, is it? Hanging around in forests consortin' with heaven knows what. All of 'em in with Dumbledore, I shouldn't wonder. Still, I'd sooner have a centaur about the place than a hag, dirty creatures, or one of those flibberty Veela."

Nicola agreed with her politely. The witch and her trolley trundled off. Nicola finished the hot chocolate, secretly thinking that if she met a Veela she'd send her off to distract Lawrie and leave Ginevra Weasley to clear up the mess.

"Honestly, I should have seen what was coming when Lawrie gave _her_ a job," she said aloud and rather crumbily through the last mouthful of cake. "Never mind that it was her that Petrified me in my second year and no one so much as took marks from Gryffindor for it. _And_ Ma gave me an earful about my report, and all Lawrie had to say about that was _you should have been grateful she Petrified Hermione Granger too, otherwise your marks would have looked a sight worse_."

The face on the mug gurned at her and rolled one eye in its socket.

Nicola tried to immerse herself in a comforting Lawrie-like grouch at the world again. It didn't work. She just felt clammy and slightly sick, and there was an awful small voice inside her that said; yes, well, you told them what you thought of them and went off to be a Wren, did you expect the wizarding world to sit still and wait for you to come back?

There was another voice, and that one was Lawrie's: _and you want her to be Disappeared because of that, do you?_

"Well, no," said Nicola aloud. "No. It's just... why is the horrible woman suddenly _my_ responsibility?"

The mug squinched its eye shut, made a complicated swallowing motion and popped the eyeball out at her on the end of a long, frog-like ceramic tongue.

"Ugh," said Nicola. "And Lawrie's as bad, with her _a little knowledge is a dangerous thing_ routine. If it wasn't that I can't stand Memory Charms..."

But she couldn't, and she knew it. She had horrible memories of going over to the Ravenclaw common room in her fifth year to ask for Miranda, and hearing a beaten, tear-clotted voice saying over and over again "I don't know what I did, Cho. I don't know what I did." It was one of the reasons she had chosen the Muggle world over the magical. But now the Wizarding world was back with a vengeance.

"Damn-blow-blast-and-bloody-hell," said Nicola again, with feeling.

She alighted onto the platform. It was cold. A skinny young man with boils on his neck clipped her ticket and squinted at her papers. "You'd best be on the six-twenty if you want to get back to London tonight, miss," he said. "There's nothing after that but the eight-forty-two special, and that's reserved for Ministry business. Not that you'd want to catch it, anyway. Gives me the shivers just seeing what you get leaning out of the windows. Goblins is the least of it, miss."

Nicola ducked her head and gave him a smile and a quick mutter of _thanks_. She hurried out, clutching her coat around her for warmth. She should have had that fur-lined cloak off Lawrie, she thought ferociously, as something on account.

The station was hidden from the Muggle road by a row of posters on rickety hoardings. One of the posters read 'Do you have what it takes to join a Magical Decontamination Squad? Full death benefits given' under a picture of a starry-eyed witch in air force blue robes clutching her wand to her breast. Another showed a group of trendily dressed young wizards and witches sitting around a table under the heading 'What is life all about? How should we use magic? What about the problem of Muggles? Take the Gammer Course." The largest poster showed Secretary to the Wizengamot Avery having a quiet smoke. As Nicola passed by he hastily spat out the cigarette, fluffed his moustache and pointed a finger grimly at her.

"Oh, put a sock in it," said Nicola. The witch in the blue robes winked.

The Muggle station on the other side of the hoardings looked long since boarded up and deserted, and the road was full of cars roaring obliviously by towards a motorway-junction, but there was a path, slippery with mud and leaves, that led down to a teashop and a car-park. Nicola stuffed her hands into her pockets. Cold stung at her fingers and toes. She hurried past the brown and white Muggle sign with its fussy injunctions about parking and walking routes and not dropping litter, and down a leaf-strewn walk into the breathing presence of the woods.

The air smelt of mulched leaves and trampled brown fern, and of wind and rain and silence. She passed an old man walking a dog who grunted and tipped his cap to her, and then a noisy Muggle school outing, all brightly-coloured windcheaters and damp activity sheets on clipboards and a harassed-looking teacher saying 'Keep _up_, Fernseed, I don't care what your mother says about the Old Ways, I grew up around here and if anyone so much as blows a kiss to one of _these_ trees there will be trouble, is that clear?"

Nicola gave the teacher a quick turned-away smile. She picked her way over a mud-clotted cattle-grid and up a side road marked _Ixion's Cloud Wood. Private Property. No Bridle Path_, thinking herself well out of all _that_ pother.

The Muggle kids hadn't looked too bad, she thought, to distract herself from the quick patter of her heart. Some of them were skinny, but children _were_ skinny sometimes, look at Chas Dodd. One or two of them had bruises, but then boys got into fights... that was just boys... and they'd probably been told to wear tatty clothes in case they fell over into cowpats...

It was no good. She wasn't distracting herself at all. For some insane reason she couldn't remember Patroklos' face, only the picture in the Daily Snitch, and the exact way she had felt when she looked at it.

After all, he'd gone off with Ginty once and left her bruisedly wondering quiet what had happened. And... she didn't want to think about this one, but there it was, thinking itself, and nothing she could do about it... he'd been her brother Peter's friend before he was hers, and Peter might have felt a bit bruised about that himself, p'raps...

"Well, well," said an unfriendly voice from behind some stripped blackberry-bushes. A centaur stepped daintily out and surveyed her. He had a small Plantagenet tuft of pale beard on his chin and an improbably fashionable haircut, and the brassy palomino shade of his flanks made Nicola involuntarily think of the _fascinating_ conversation she'd once had with a passing tinker about ways of passing off stolen horses. His tail twitched from side to side like that of an affronted cat.

"It wanders into the woods, does it? Can't it read?" He put out a large hand to caress her cheek. Nicola swerved reflexively backwards. "Maybe it _wanted_ to come and revel with the centaurs, hmmm? Oh, how cute, it's reaching for its wand..."

"No, it's reaching for its service revolver," said Nicola briskly, keeping her hand prudently in her jacket pocket. "If you're feeling useful, you can tell Patroklos I'm here."

The centaur minced backwards. "We are the smiths of the world," he observed. "Show us a Muggle thing, and if the stars are right for its inception, we will make it our own."

Nicola had a sudden awful vision of Professor Sprout asking 'Nicola, what do you know about this army of centaurs with AK-47s?' whilst looking wise but pained and knocking some compost out of a flowerpot.

"Get lost, Giavone," said a familiar voice.

_Patroklos_. Nicola felt a rush of relief mixed with the usual surprised unfamiliarity like the sharp bite of spices; whenever they met, they always had to work out how they fitted together again. Patroklos and Giavone stared at each other. Nicola watched them. She had seen enough of centaurs to know that this wasn't senior facing down junior; it was _I am enough of an unpredictable yellow-eyed bastard that you don't want to provoke me_.

Giavone gave a little shake of his head like a horse trying to get rid of a fly. "I should have known you'd come trotting up to the humans like a pony begging for a lump of sugar. You're measuring your own neck for a halter."

"What's this?" asked a deep, sad voice. Another centaur came ghosting through the trees as silently as a roe-deer. His flanks were the slick colour of tree-bark after rain, and he had an patriarchal greying brown beard. Nicola began to feel alarmed, and distinctly outnumbered.

Perhaps it was just the centaur's resemblance to an instructor with a similar beard and lugubrious foghorn voice, who had been able to pack almost as much sarcasm into addressing a class as _young gentleman and ladies_ as Professor Snape had managed with _Miss Marlow of Hufflepuff_. Then again, she thought, squirming inwardly at the memory, Commander Brogan had never given the impression that anything a cack-handed young officer did could possibly rattle his cool, up to and including sinking the entire training fleet in the middle of the River Dart with half the Royal Family watching. Whereas Snape... It was the difference, she thought uneasily, between walking past a room full of warheads and walking over the top of a concreted-over nuclear reactor somewhere in Russia.

"Patroklos is consorting with the humans again," said Giavone whinily. "Truckling to them like a common mule. Though if he _is_ a mule, it might be the best thing under the circumstances."

An astonished, cheek-burning second later, Nicola got his drift. The newcomer regarded him sadly. "The Grand Cross rises in the sky, bringing with it challenges and disunity. We must take time to study what it portends. This is no time for hasty conclusions."

"No one's coming to hasty conclusions," said Patroklos. "This is Nicola. Nicola, this is Rollo."

Rollo regarded Nicola with cold, poached-looking eyes. "Stars rise and prophecies fall, and we observe. The world is reflected in the skies, for those who take the time to watch. The light of seven thousand years ago shines in the same sky as the light of two million. What is written there was already written, long before centaurs or humans ever walked the earth."

Nicola racked her brains for anything that she knew about astrology. She couldn't think of much, mostly because she'd always thought it was a rubbishy subject and fit only for the back page of Witch Weekly. "Um... my communications officer was always blaming things going wrong on Mercury retrograde," she offered matily.

Rollo looked even more comprehensively disappointed. "That is a popular delusion," he said in a droning boom. "Come, Giavone. Let us be away."

They disappeared into the forest, their hooves clopping on the tarmac road and then becoming muffled by the fallen leaves. Nicola looked at Patroklos. "_Whoo_," she said expressively. "He's like Bane, only more so."

Patroklos grinned at her companionably, and suddenly it was all right. Here he was, and here she was, and the bizarre schemes that the rest of the world got into really had nothing to do with it. "So how was it?" he asked. "I've always wanted to go on a ship... not that I'd be any good at the saluting or the companion-ladders..." He gave her a quick, arched smile. "But I've always thought the actual sailoring must be fairly glorious. _All I want is a tall ship and a star to sail her by_."

She tucked her hand into his arm. "It is, sometimes, when there's nothing but you and the stars and the cold and the black Atlantic. Though everything that isn't Navy seems to be containers these days, which is a terrible shame..."

He agreed that it was.

\--

It was dark when Nicola woke. She was curled against the comforting warmth of Patroklos' side. She wasn't as cold as she had expected. The air smelt of distant smoke, and the breathing earth, and not at all of the crispness of morning.

Something poked her in the ear. She reached up and flapped at it, dimly suspecting horseflies. It wheeled round, passing her eyes in a mercury-coloured streak, and poked her in the ear again.

"Ow!" On her third try, Nicola flailed herself out of her coat, which she was using as a blanket, and managed to catch it. It was a small, silvery dart. It twitched in her palm.

"Your sister Karen summons you in her hour of need," it said tinnily.

Nicola sat back and pulled the coat up under her chin. "Messenger spell," she said crossly. "Thank you so much, Karen's final-year dissertation. I bet she's just forgotten how to light her Aga or something. She does _flap_."

Patroklos got to his feet. "You know her better than I do," he said with the yawningly elaborate politeness of someone who could do with some hours more sleep. "_Is_ she likely to be just flapping?"

"Your sister Karen summons you in her hour of need," repeated the silver dart. Nicola smoothed back her hair with one hand and twisted it into its knot again. Most of her thoughts still seemed to be wading stickily through sleep. "I don't know. She's never flapped like _this_ before. I mean, this is a Restricted Spell, I don't think she..."

He leaned down to look at the dart with what she was annoyed to notice was more fascinated interest than sympathy with those burdened with sisters. The dart quivered. "What does it do?"

"I squeeze it in my hand and it takes me to somewhere close to Karen. It's a bit like a Portkey."

"Why not straight to her?"

"I don't know. I suppose it's so that people can use it if they're trapped in cellars, or whatever."

"Does that happen a lot?"

"I wouldn't have put it past Chas whilst he was still at home, but he's off at Edwin's Alma Mater on a scholarship." Nicola frowned. "I'd better go."

"_We'd_ better go."

"Oh. Really?" She gave her hair a last tidying swipe and smiled at him, feeling shy but pleased, and remarkably equal to dealing with whatever had flapped Karen at this hour of the night. "You probably want to keep your distance from Karen's Rose, though. She doesn't like horses much."

The look on his face told her that he was already planning on keeping a distance from any of that kind of social bother. Nicola shook her head. "_You_," she said with a gruffly possessive fondness. "Let's be off, then."


	5. Chapter 5

Fob clung on around Baddock's waist. It felt very peculiar being this close to someone she didn't know, and who had no very particular remit concerning keeping her alive. The broom dug into her thighs. It felt far too frail and narrow to be supporting two people, and alarmingly self-willed - like the difference, she thought, between holding a soft toy in one's arms and holding a cat or a newborn lamb.

Beneath her, the ground rushed by. It looked very different from up here. She hadn't expected the rise at the back of Trennels to make such a crumpled, crouched-lion bulk, or Brendan's Pale to look so sharply delineated and small. The shadows and the moonlight were different too, sweeping across the landscape on a wholly inhuman scale.

"Still south?" asked Baddock sharply.

"South," said Fob through the cold that had anaesthetised her lips and made her feel like she'd just been to the dentist. Her nose and ears had gone numb altogether.

Below them, a mist crept up from the cold ground. Fob clung on. She didn't have a plan. But the coast lay southward, and Peter was on the coast. Peter would know what to do.

\--

Nicola and Patroklos Apparated into the kitchen; which was fortunate, as it was the only room in the Dodd house that could possibly accomodate a person built on the same scale as an Aga or a piano. Rose was sitting at the big kitchen table with her head pillowed on her arms, sobbing in a sulky, convulsive manner.

Karen made vague introductory noises, but was clearly so distracted that it would only have dimly registered with her if Nicola had shown up with a herd of Bicorns. "Oh... Nicola... thank goodness... um... hello..."

"We've met, I think, Madam Dodd," said Patroklos gently, bending his head in one of those stiff-necked centaur bows that Nicola was amused to recognise as his _very_ company manners. "When Madame Orly visited,"

"Oh, yes, I remember, there was that business with Nicola's hawk," Karen looked at Nicola as if she expected her to conjure back the shades of hawks long dead. "Thank you. You know Grandmother's still as well as ever, living in Paris... that's a point, Nick, you'd like this, you're interested in family history, you wouldn't _believe_ what she told Giles when he was last over there doing the dutiful grandson bit and picking up a cheque. All these reminiscences about Beauxbatons in the nineteen-thirties, wizarding photographs of her in peculiar blousy robes, really, you'd think she'd have _said_..."

At any other time, Nicola would have been fascinated. At present, she just wrote it off as being exactly _like_ her grandmother. "_Kay_. Hour of need?"

"Rose's boyfriend seems to have kidnapped Fob."

Rose raised her head from her arms. Her toffee-brown eyes were infested with tears, and her features looked sleepily thick. She had quite evidently been crying for hours. "That's not what happened! It was all Fob's stupid fault! Why is there a centaur here?"

Patroklos removed himself unobtrusively from what sounded like a blush-makingly _family_ conversation and busied himself helpfully with mugs and teabags. Nicola, watching him fondly, realised that it was not just unfamiliarity making him slow; he still found being indoors enough of an adventure to be committing every detail to memory. She watched him delightedly examining the Muggle kettle and felt a wholly unfamiliar watery feeling and a vague embarrassed desire to run her finger down his backbone to the downy beginnings of his coat.

"Vincent came to dinner," said Karen reluctantly, "... and... well, it seems that Fob was harbouring a Mrs Abbott in the kitchen - she seemed like such a nice woman, too - I don't know how she got there, I think it was something to do with the Miss Blakes' house-elf... and then the next thing I knew Vincent was saying he had some business to attend to and storming out into the night, and I don't think I quite registered that he'd taken Fob with him. I've owled the Miss Blakes to see whether she's there, though I don't really understand how..."

Nicola did vaguely remembered Peter saying something about _that Dark Eater boyfriend of Rose's_. She had assumed at the time that it was just Peter indulging in aggrieved hyperbole, something he was nearly as accomplished at as Lawrie. "Hang on. Slow down, Kay. Vincent's a wizard?"

"He's a really _important_ wizard," said Rose scornfully. "He's much more of a wizard than you or Peter or anybody else, and he never made me feel like crap for not being a witch."

"Oh, _Rose_, no one ever meant..." said Karen helplessly.

"Don't tell me you weren't all waiting for me to get an owl, because you _were_, and the only thing that made it any better was that Chas and Fob didn't get one either," said Rose in a tired, flat voice. "Well, they've shut the place down, now, and good riddance. Vincent said it was always infested with Hippogriffs biting people and huge great snakes in the basement and stuff."

"Vincent? Vincent _Crabbe_?" asked Nicola carefully.

"There, I said he was an important wizard. _Nick's_ heard of him," said Rose, sounding like someone who had got used to taking her triumphs where she found them. Karen spat on a handkerchief and started attempting to dab at her stepdaughter's smeared makeup. Rose twitched impatiently away. "And what's more, once he's found a cottage or something, I'm going to move in with him, and you can't stop me, because you're not my real mother."

Karen looked comprehensively shattered. "Rose, I don't think..."

"You don't know what things are going to be like," said Rose with a terrible, desperate smugness. "You don't know what'll happen to people who pick the wrong side. _I_ know. I'm not going to sit around here and wait for them to herd me into a pen. I'm going to be all right. Vincent _protects_ me. He doesn't spend all his time poking through old books or chuntering about how you can't get the Shipping Forecast on the WWN." She blushed, an altogether different blush to her earlier tearful redness. "He does _real_ things."

Nicola sat down. She had never given much thought to Vincent Crabbe. He had always just been there, a looming, not very welcome presence like a next-week's dental appointment. "Was Draco Malfoy here, too? Or Gregory Goyle?" she asked, almost at random.

"Draco Malfoy's dead," said Karen, seizing onto something she could actually answer.

"_Here_?" asked Nicola, looking towards the sitting-room as if she expected to see a corpse laid out on the sofa.

"In _Wiltshire_," said Rose scornfully. "He was Vincent's best friend. Vincent says he's only doing what he does now in Draco's memory. If he gets angry, or... or kidnaps people, _which he'd only do if it was something to do with his work and he's sure to bring her back_, it's only because his friend's dead."

That struck Nicola as a very handy excuse. She was about to say so and damn the over-egged feelings of all sixteen-year-olds, when there was a tiny knock at the door. Karen went to open it.

A small figure came cringing in, tugging an ear like a banana-leaf down over her face in substitute for a forelock. She appeared to be dressed in a chintz peg-bag. "Totty is sorry! Totty is forgetting the wine and mushroom preserves you asked for! Totty is not reminding Miss Maud and Miss Fenella about them, either! Totty is not remembering anyone even _mentioning_ port or mushroom preserves! Totty is a very, very bad house-elf!" she squeaked, stumbling about and getting tangled up in Patroklos' legs.

Patroklos stood very still. If his ears could have quivered, Nicola thought, they would have been doing so. She leaned down and fished the house-elf kindly out. Totty gave a long shuddering sigh and knocked her head several times on the table-leg. "Totty is sorry! Totty was not wanting to disturb your centaur! Totty is knowing that centaurs are being very noble creatures!"

Patroklos gave the smallest possible slanting nod and continued to stand very still. Nicola was irresistibly reminded of Ginty's nervy chestnut Catkin confronted by a barking dog. She supposed that anything with a head smaller than one's hoof-print _must_ seem very small and incomprehensible. "That's all right, Totty. Have Miss Blake and Miss Fenella seen Fob?"

"Miss Maud and Miss Fenella have not been seeing her! Miss Maud and Miss Fenella _have_ been strange wizards flying brooms in the sky. Miss Maud said one of them was flying a Nimbus 2001 and had been a Beater at one time, she was quite sure of it! Miss Maud said a lot more about Quidditch, but Totty is forgetting," finished Totty humbly, fishing a clothes-peg out of the pocket on the front of the bag she was wearing and attaching it to her ear by way of penance. "Ow! Ow! Totty is sorry! Miss Maud was saying that she saw a broom this evening with two people on it heading out towards the sea-coast, but Miss Maud was being more interested in talking about Quidditch," she finished.

"Crabbe and Goyle both used to play Beater, and the Slytherin team had Nimbus 2001s," said Nicola briskly. "I'll get after them. Karen - have you got a broom here?"

"I'll follow you," said Patroklos.

"I don't think you'll keep up," said Nicola doubtfully. "It's really difficult following a broom when you're..." She edited out _when you're riding_. "I mean, we used to go out in the holidays with some of us on brooms and some on horses and Ann on her bicycle, and..."

"Oh, no, Miss Nicola! Centaurs can run for ever and ever! Totty is knowing!" squeaked Totty, her eyes growing even rounder. "Miss Maud is always talking about how useful it'd be to cross-breed for centaur vigour! Miss Maud is saying that in the old days..."

"Never mind that now, Totty," interrupted Karen dampingly. "Thank the Miss Blakes and tell them not to worry about the port or the mushroom preserves." She frowned, evidently trying to work out how the port and the preserves had insinuated themselves into events. "I don't know what happened there. An owl must have gone astray, or something."

"Totty will search the road for owl-pellets," offered Totty humbly. "Totty is not minding."

"No, that's quite all right, Totty."

"Totty will at least wash up after your dinner-party," said Totty with a doubtful glance at the sink. "Miss Fenella was saying that it did her heart good to hear of people entertaining properly in the neighbourhood, and she was hoping Miss Rose's young man was a pureblood."

"His name's Vincent Crabbe, he used to be a Beater on the Slytherin team and he got two OWLs, which was one more than Goyle," said Nicola briskly. "Anything else Miss Fenella wanted to know? I don't happen to remember his blood type or his shoe size."

Totty elevated her bulbous nose and looked indignant. "Miss Fenella did not send Totty to pry! Miss Fenella is _despising_ idle gossip! Miss Fenella is always saying so! Miss Fenella would never want to know what the noble centaur is doing here. Miss Fenella is expecting everyone to ignore her and Miss Maud because they are being a pair of feeble useless old women, and no one is to be minding who borrowed whose secateurs last June." Totty gave a wounded sniff. "Totty could be staying here and looking for the secateurs once she has finished washing up. Totty is not minding."

Karen got up and started randomly poking through the airing-cupboard. Nicola stared at her, wondering whether it was some kind of effect of the shock. "Tea-cosy... jumper... _now where is the pair for this sock?_" asked Karen, flinging clothes randomly over her shoulder.

Totty shrieked and vanished. Karen started picking the clothes up again. "It's the only way to get rid of her," she explained apologetically. She tapped her wand over one of the socks. "Here, Nick, take this Tracing Charm, it'll help you follow Fob."

Nicola nodded, frowning. "Whyever would the Miss Blakes want Rose to go out with a pureblood? They don't even like it when _Muggleborns_ marry Muggles. I've heard Miss Blake's _they should be made to pay the cost of a magical education back to the Ministry, the ungrateful swine_ speech often enough."

Karen gave a little, conscious smile. "Well, I sort of let them think Edwin was a very ceremonial magician. You know how people who study the Dark Arts either turn out like Mad-Eye Moody and curse their own shoelaces when they can't undo the knots or go quite the other way? Well, they assumed Edwin went quite the other way, and I didn't argue with them. It would have been really awkward if they'd started sending us Howlers and jinxing our water-mains. I was only thinking of Mum,"

"Hmmm," said Nicola, who hadn't noticed consideration for their mother being the hallmark of Karen's behaviour around the time of her marriage to Edwin Dodd. "Didn't you expect it all to fall over when Rose didn't get an owl?"

"Oh, no, in fact Miss Blake came round and told me that lots of traditional wizarding families actually _prefer_ their sons to marry Squibs. Same chance of magical offspring and much less likelihood of running foul of a Greasing Charm on the stairs. It's different for male Squibs, of course - she's always been a bit off around Chas."

Rose dropped her mug. Dregs and tea-leaves spattered across the table. "What do you mean? I know you hate me, but..."

"No one hates you," said Karen.

"Why are you telling lies, then? Dad _was_ a wizard. I _am_ a Squib."

Karen looked utterly tired. "I'm terribly sorry, Rose. I thought you knew."

"Why would I know? No one ever tells me anything!" Rose flung out of the room, pausing to yell from the foot of the stairs "And it doesn't matter, anyway! Vincent doesn't care about that kind of thing!" in a tone of voice that suggested she didn't even believe it herself.

Karen picked up the teacup and put it on the draining board, moving like an exhausted robot. Patroklos took several tactful clattering steps back out of her way. Nicola held the sock. It twitched in her hands, beckoning southward. She hesitated over asking _does Rowan know what's happened to Fob_ and decided that now was no moment to be delving into the strained relations between her two eldest sisters. "Broom in the usual place? Lend me Catullus so I can send him if I need help?"

"He's over at the Trennels owlery,"

"Never _mind_," Nicola buttoned her coat up tight to the neck against the night's chill. "C'n I borrow a scarf?"

She had an uncomfortable feeling that she shouldn't leave Karen looking so desolated, but Karen, like Lawrie, had always been far more resilient than people gave her credit for. Besides, Nicola thought with a hot feeling under her collar, if Karen and Rose started arguing again she was _much_ better off out of it, thank you very much.

She paused, struck by something not right about the big farmhouse kitchen. Flag floor, familiar unrepeatable old rug, big hacked-about butchers-block wood table, Aga, dresser... "What's that doing out?" she asked, picking up a photo album that was open to a picture of an unrecognisably young Giles brandishing a newly-caught fish. Giles grinned out from under the silvery flop of a most peculiar long bowl-cut, his face pale and pointy and covered in mud. He waved at her. The fish wriggled.

"Vincent was looking at them," said Karen harassedly, flapping her hands at her. "Nicola - please - go."

\--

They must, Fob thought, have been flying south for quite a long way now. She wasn't sure how fast brooms went. Perhaps they were like boats, and what felt like ninety-down-a-motorway was actually not much faster than going downhill on a bicycle. She clung onto Baddock's waist and tried to tell herself that no one who had the back of their robes cut to look like a bomber jacket could be _that_ scary.

Below them, the mist unexpectedly parted, as cleanly as if it had been unzipped, revealing the dark reflecting sea. Baddock pulled his broom upwards and let out a low, snarling stream of expletives. The only word Fob actually understood was 'Muggle' but it sounded somehow worse than all the rest.

He looked over his shoulder at her and swore again. She could only see a strangely naked-looking ear and a white contorted stripe of face. "I should bloody drop you and let the giant sea-snakes eat you! Messin' me about like that!"

"They don't have giant sea-snakes in the Channel."

"They will if I bloody conjure some up!"

"I may be a Muggle, but I have lots of relatives who are wizards and witches and I bet they'd have the sense to get you surrounded before they cursed you," said Fob, wondering desperately what Peter would do in this situation. "_Peter'_d find you. You... you can bet on that."

For some reason this made him crumple his brow in thought. "Yeah, the brother..." he muttered to himself. "I'll take you back to Base. The boss'll probably have finished with that old trout Abbott by now." His face contorted upwards into a snarl. "I'm only doing this because I don't like you. If I'd liked you I'd have left you for the sea-snakes. He's a complete _psycho_, our boss,"

He pulled the broom into a tight turn. Fob's heart gave a delirious leap.

She could see two blond figures on brooms, rising through the mist. Fob pressed cold thumbs. _Peter_.

\--

Nicola met Peter just above the chimneys of Trennels. Both of them were glad to have things to say to each other like _Karen sent me_ and _Ro sent me, she's got to do the farm rounds_ and _Have you heard Lawrie's latest scheme_ and _Yes, I'm best man_ as they followed an arrow-straight course towards the coast. Patroklos followed them below, running like a shadow.

If it had to be one of her family going with her, Nicola thought as the fields dropped away beneath her, she probably would have picked Peter, awkwardness or not. She didn't get airsick on brooms any more, not after the events of her fourth year, but the memory of it stayed with her; and she knew from the set, gripped look of Peter's hands that he too would far rather be riding a horse. She gave him a quick, tight smile. "Drat Fob. What does she think she's up to?"

"I know what she's up to," said Peter grimly. "She's leading them in a straight line away from Rum Beacon. I'm expecting that woman of Lawrie's to Portkey in tonight."

"Those American people who go on about _assumptive attitude_ have nothing at all on Lawrie," said Nicola furiously. "There she goes, just _assuming_ I'm willing to go through with this ludicrous scheme of hers so that her horrible girlfriend can get to France."

"Arrr," said Peter darkly. "Now, missy, Oi b'aint so certain that it's Miss Lovegood she's spoony over,"

"Oh, _don't_ do Mummerzet, Binks!"

"Don't call me Binks," Peter bit back whatever he was going to say next. In front of them the cliffs dropped away to a sliver of beach and then to rolling waves. Skimming low over the sea were two figures on a broom. Peter reached into the front of his windcheater and took out his wand. It looked small in his hand. "I'll deal with him, you fly underneath and catch her," he offered.

Nicola shook her head. "_I'll_ deal with him, _you_ fly underneath and catch her,"

He looked at her suspiciously. "Why?"

"Because she won't believe for a minute that you'll miss," said Nicola glibly.

"Oh," said Peter, mollified. "Well, all right, then,"

Nicola made a flippant salute and lifted her broom higher. For a moment she almost thought she felt what Rowan and Ginty said they felt when riding a broom - the acceleration, the salt wind on her face, the feeling of living in three glorious dimensions.

The person on the broom with Fob wasn't Vincent Crabbe. He was a much smaller man - only a boy, really, Nicola thought - with greasy-looking very short dark hair. She began to feel encouraged. She took one hand off the broom to give a cocky little wave. "Oi! Death Eater Junior League! Up here!"

He stared up. She couldn't see much of his face except for a corrugated brow. His broom ducked and wove about, making it very hard for her to get a fix on him. Nicola wasn't quite whether it was evasive manouvres or Fob trying to throttle him.

_Damn it, Fob_, Nicola thought furiously, _I don't want to curse you by mistake_.

The boy on the broom rose to chase her, just as she had been hoping, giving Peter room to duck in low in preparation for any Fob-catching that needed to be done. A spell flew past her ear. She thought it was some kind of jinx, but she wasn't certain.

"Confundus!" she shouted, on the grounds that if Fob got confused it wasn't likely to make matters any _worse_. The broom below stopped and quivered in the air. The small figures on it seemed to be grappling, wobbling to and fro, their reflection shattered into pieces on the slow-rolling water below.

"Oh, drat this," said Nicola recklessly. "What are six years of Transfiguration _for_, anyway?" She pointed her wand at Baddock, sighted down it as if it was a rifle, and concentrated.

Fob yelped and fell off the broom. A thin, silvery shape flopped out of her hands and down into the sea.

Peter snicked his broom neatly underneath and caught her. His broom dropped two feet vertically with the impact. Peter's feet made two silvery trails as they scudded over the surface of the waves. Fob was waving her arms about and shouting something. Peter's broom lifted and started to make a slow, chugging progress inland.

_Well, if that's the worst the Death Eaters can do_, thought Nicola, feeling cheered up, and turned her broom to follow them.

\--

"What did you do?" asked Fob as they sat on top of Rum Beacon and opened the sandwiches that the devastatingly practical Rowan had sent with Peter. Evidently, Peter had been giving her a telling-off; equally evidently, Fob had only registered that she was getting his full attention _and_ that she was out at night on a broom _and_ that she was getting to help, once again, with rescuing wizards. "Did you curse him?"

"I Transfigured him into an Atlantic cod. The worst harm he'll come to is finding the water a bit warm for him. Maybe not even that, at this time of year." Nicola reached for a bacon sandwich. "Fob, what are you giggling at?"

"It says _I Shag Centaurs_ on your forehead in zits," gulped Fob.

Nicola unwrapped Karen's scarf from around her neck and tied it onto her head pirate-fashion, resisting the urge to use it instead to garotte Fob. Mist filled the valley below them like a moat. Patroklos peeled the bacon carefully out of his sandwich and ate it, discarding the bread and mustard. "Actually, it said _I Shag Cetnurs_. I don't think Baddock could spell," he offered precisely, his golden eyes glinting with amusement. "I'd be thankful he didn't manage to spell it any worse."

"Well, I'm not. I wish I'd turned him into... into blotting-paper," said Nicola, standing up and leaning against his muscled shoulder as if she could transfer his warm strength into her own bones instead. "Little Slytherin _git_. Where the heck is Loony Lovegood? It's just like her to be late."

"Rowan'll worry," agreed Peter.

"Rowan wouldn't worry if the sky fell down," chirped Fob.

"If the sky does fall down, you needn't think I'm going to rescue you from it," said Peter, looking fierce.

Fob wriggled her shoulders in pleased appreciation.

\--

Rowan finished the farm rounds and locked the kitchen door behind her. She almost felt like doing the rounds again, just to have something to do.

_This is not me_, she thought. _I am not worrying_. She poured herself a Firewhiskey and sipped it.

_This is me. I'm worrying. I should have left the farm rounds to Peter. I should have gone myself..._

High up on the kitchen wall, a bell gave a clattering whirr. Rowan looked up at the timber board mounted with brass bells. They had old, dead pieces of paper pinned beneath them bearing the names of rooms; _Billiard Room, Master Lawrence's Room, Conservatory_. The one that was ringing now was the only one that still worked, and read _Front Door_. Beneath it another piece of paper was tacked, bearing a spidery admonition to the effect that any servant answering the door must wear a clean apron.

Rowan was almost thankful. She downed the rest of the Firewhiskey and hurried to the door, thinking that if this was Peter's idea of a joke she would throttle him.

There was only one figure on the doorstep, and he was far too thin to be Peter. Besides, no Marlow had ever been born with blazing red hair. He was wearing neat, shabby, rather clerkly robes and horn-rimmed spectacles. He gave a little cough.

"Madam Marlow? We've been investigating some unlicensed wand use in the area. I'm afraid I must ask you to kindly let me in and assist me in checking your house for malefactors." He cleared his throat. "I really am very sorry about this. It's Ministry protocol, you know. We've had a complaint. I'm Percy W..."

"Good God, Percy, I know who you are," interrupted Rowan. "Come in and tell me all about it."

He hesitated and pushed his spectacles up his nose. It was a better nose than any of his brothers', Rowan thought, particularly Roman-looking; then again, Ron had always looked like a boiled piglet and the rest like ourang-outans, apart from Bill who she'd always had a deep desire to see fall off his broom and sit down looking flummoxed in a puddle. She gave him her friendliest smile. "We were Gryffindors together, weren't we? We were nearly prefects together. Come in."

He hung his cloak neatly on the coat-rack. "I always... ah, I always thought that showed remarkable maturity in you. Even though I never said anything."

"Come into the kitchen," Rowan took down a _different_ bottle of Firewhiskey from the shelf. She sat down, propped her threadbare elbows on the kitchen table and smiled at him. "It all seems such a long time ago, doesn't it? Do you remember that feud between your and my horrid young?"

"I really shouldn't drink on duty,"

"Think of it as a preventative against airborne contaminants. I'm running a farm here, you know. I'm going to need you to wash your hands and walk through a trough of disinfectant, as well."

He looked surprised. She looked back at him, her pale blue eyes depthless. "I can't afford to take any risks. You know how the country's off for food," she said, leaning forward to pour. "You work for the Ministry. You know about the quotas."

"Well... yes," he said reluctantly. "It's all meant for the best, you know. It's the fairest means of sharing things out. It means no one can stockpile." He hesitated, fingers curling round the glass. "If it's a question of proper procedure..."

"You want to see the forms I'll have to fill in if you don't?"

"Oh. Forms." He looked up, the smile transforming his rather solemn face. "Yes. I had a lot of experience with forms when I was at the Department for International Co-op... ugh..."

He slumped, face forward, over the table. Rowan found herself hoping he hadn't broken that particularly Roman nose.

She carefully tipped him back in the chair, retrieved his glasses from a puddle of Firewhiskey and slipped them into his pocket. She gave him a rather rueful look.

"Well, I'm not carrying you down to the cellar myself," she said briskly. "Peter, for pete's sake, _where are you_?"


	6. Chapter 6

"In... far too long... this'll all be over," said Nicola resignedly as Susan attempted to fix a veil onto her new, spiky, Lawrie-like hairstyle by means of several small, useless plastic combs. "I bet yours wasn't half this much _fuss_."

"No, it was much worse, and I don't have any sympathy for you," said Susan in her usual unemphatic way. "You get to waltz in at the eleventh hour and get all the attention, instead of spending six sodding months duelling with Mummy Finch-Fletchley. As far as I can see you're not acquiring any kind of mother-in-law at all, unless there's some amazonian old biddy with a blue rinse and matching tail out there in the forest. How _do_ centaurs... no, never mind, we went through all that on the hen night. That and all the 'groom' jokes."

"I wasn't at the hen night, that was Lawrie," said Nicola wearily. The veil slid down over her face. Susan plumped it into a fluffy heap and dumped it on top of her head again. The sunlight from outside filtered brightly through the striped walls of the tent, which had been borrowed from Susan's aunt, and had a purple deep-pile carpet and a lot of irrelevant candelabras.

Nicola felt generally useless and headachy, and as if she had been on the hen night after all. "So what did Mummy Finch-Fletchley do?"

"Spent the entirety of our six-month engagement marching into rooms dragging some unfortunate Sophie or Saskia along by her Alice-band and saying 'Fusty, _look_ who's staying at the Grange!' like a gorgon out of a Jilly Cooper. I kept hoping she'd follow through with it and run off with a Ruritanian polo-player, but no such luck. After a while I decided that she wasn't actually trying to shove him towards a _gel from a more suitable background_, she was hoping if he saw one more hopeful horse-face he'd declare that he'd been gay all along and he and Mummy F-F could spend a happy life together criticising other peoples' tastes in garden design."

"What about Daddy F-F?"

"Oh, he's an old sweetie, even if he does think it's astonishingly funny to stand up and start singing 'Have you met Miss Bones?' whenever I come into the room," said Susan tolerantly. "He even wheeled Mummy F-F off and started feeding her sherry when she turned up on the morning of the wedding and started poking at the flowers and saying 'Don't those look a little _done_ to you?' to no one in particular. I was _this_ close to smacking her with a Freezing Charm and trying to pass her off as an ice-sculpture."

She tapped the wand again. The triangular lump of tulle that had been sitting on Nicola's head looking like number fifty-seven in a series of 'Bad Materials From Which To Build A Pyramid' smoothed itself out and fell down over Nicola's shoulders. "_Adhero_! There, that should stay put."

"How long for?" asked Nicola suspiciously.

"Up to twelve hours," Susan assured her rather too breezily. "Put your hands out and I'll do your nails."

"I don't need my nails done,"

"_Lawrie_ always gets her nails done," said Susan meaningfully.

Nicola submitted. It felt uncomfortable to be sitting here being fussed over by Susan, when she hadn't seen anything of Susan since the cataclysmic events of their sixth year. Partly it was guilt that she hadn't thought to send Susan more than a couple of postcards; partly it was a wriggling discomfort that Susan so clearly didn't _mind_ being neglected, and had been cheerfully neglectful in her turn. "Good God, are those Doxy wings decorating the veil?"

"They're pretty. And anyway, they've been disinfected. Don't you know there's a national crisis on?"

"You're sure they're not going to start lighting up and spelling out _Lawrie Marlow's Controversial Wedding, As Sponsored By Leechbuilder's Patent Broom Liniment_ or anything?" asked Nicola suspiciously.

"I do most horribly swear," said Susan glossily.

Nicola squinted suspiciously down her own arm at the top of Susan's neatly parted hair. She wondered, not for the first time, why on earth she had agreed to any of this. She would _far_ sooner be back out in the North Atlantic under a fishbelly sky.

"So. Lawrie and Luna, huh? It doesn't seem terribly likely to me, if you don't mind me saying so. I thought Luna was going out with Cho Chang."

"It doesn't seem terribly likely to me either," said Nicola gloomily. "Susan - how long have _you_ known that - "

There was a loud yelping shriek from the front reception-room of the tent, which was hung with heraldic-looking tapestries showing maidens with unicorns and rather effete young knights confronting armies of skeletons. It was followed by a hollow boom, a smell of sulphur and some more shrieking.

Susan put the pot of nail polish neatly down _and_ screwed the lid back on, something neither Lawrie nor Nicola would have thought to do, and went to investigate. Clutching her veil suspiciously (though it did, in fact, seem to be staying put) Nicola followed.

The vestibule was full of choking green smoke. All the knights on the tapestry were hiding behind the maidens and hopping up and down in nervously in their ridiculously long-toed shoes. She couldn't see through the smoke to tell what the skeletons were doing with the unicorn.

"Pooh, gosh! _Ablutamus!_" choked Susan, waving her wand. The air cleared. A small girl with bright red plaits, a bright red face, bright red clenched fists and a set of disastrously frilly yellowish-brown robes was standing foursquare in the middle of the floor making convulsive whooping noises. Two more small redheads had clearly intended to make a clean escape but then got into a meaningful private struggle over a wand. Susan hurried over to the one with the plaits. "Oh dear. Wilhelmina, isn't it? Do you need your inhaler?"

Wilhelmina took an entirely normal breath and glared at her instead. "I haven't got asthma. It's Izzy who has asthma. _I_ was crying because Dick said Auntie Ginny's old robes made me look like a sausage roll. One of the tarted-up ones Auntie Pansy makes."

Susan raised her eyebrows slightly, suppressed whatever was trying to make itself felt about her mouth and eyes and went over to the two in the doorway. "Are you two Izzy and Dick?" asked Susan, plucking the wand neatly out of a sticky small hand. "And don't tell me that wand belongs to either of you, because you're neither of you old enough."

The smaller of the two looked up angelically at her and then looked down in satisfaction at the spreading puddle on the tent's carpet. The other one said a very bad word and darted out and away into what Nicola was dismayed to notice was becoming quite a crowd. She couldn't pick out any faces, only a swaying sea of robes and hats. Someone was holding forth in a pained, butterscotch Edinburgh accent about the dreadful number of _theatrical_ people on the train.

"That's not Izzy, that's _Molly_," said Wilhelmina disgustedly. "What does 'tarted up' mean, anyway? Is it something to do with pastry?"

"I'm just going to go and return these two to their... grandmother," said Susan rather desperately. "Or _my_ grandmother, whichever I find first."

Nicola rather absently charmed away the puddle and continued to look out of the doorway. Her dismay deepened as she noticed two bearded centaurs. They were pausing side-on to each other with every possible muscle arched, in that centaur way that meant _trouble_.

They smiled at each other, tight-lipped. "It is possible," said one in a deep rumble, "that you failed to understand my meaning. If you had been observing the sky rather than concerning yourself with petty human matters, you would have realised that Saturn was highest in the sky at that time, and that this heralded Iason's victory in that year's archery trials."

"If _you_ had been observing the sky, you would have realised that the elevation of Saturn was less than four degrees, and that the important point was that Venus was trine to the mid-heavens, and that this portended the humans' betrayal of the goblin treaty known as the Restitutions of Alnwick." said the other, squaring his already enormous shoulders. "I must conclude that you were _not_ observing the sky, and were somewhere else, probably off gathering dead ferrets for your latest stepmother."

"If you are alluding to those rumours about my father and the hippogriff," rumbled the first centaur, looking disconcerted, "I will inform you that nothing was ever proven, and that..."

"Oh, leave that old story alone," said a silkily nasty voice. "So what if his father liked hippogriffs? At least they have the right plumbing, which is more than you can say for Patroklos' choice. I wouldn't be surprised if _he_ had some hippogriff blood in him, either, with those yellow eyes of his. Shall we see if there's anything to eat at this stupid affair?"

"Greetings to you, Giavone," boomed the second centaur. "Perhaps you can assist us. We were speaking of the great conjunction of 1215..."

The three of them moved off, lazily slow and sun-dappled like deer in a forest. Nicola felt suddenly sick. Why had Patroklos invited Giavone of all people?

Come to that, why was the place swarming with Weasleys? she added indignantly to herself as yet another shiningly auburn head intruded itself through the tent-flap. It turned out to belong to a tall, handsome wizard with a single earring and sharkskin boots, who was managing to hold two champagne glasses and a bottle and still have an arm to steady Nicola with. "Whoa there! Wedding nerves?" he said, pouring her a glass.

"You could say that," said Nicola wryly. She sipped the champagne. It felt much nicer than the last time she'd tried it, almost as if it was melting inside her to something less substantial than liquid. He chinked his glass against hers. The bubbles tilted upwards. Nicola wondered frantically whether Lawrie was any better at telling Ginevra Weasley's brothers apart than _she_ was. "Um... Charlie?" she guessed.

"Bill," he said, looking amused. "Charlie's the one with the pureed carrots on his tie and the very ornamental wife. I was wondering whether your sister was about?"

"Any sister in particular?" asked Nicola. "N-Nick can't make it and neither can Ginty - "

Unwillingly, she remembered her own cold, nasty rush of relief at reading Ginty's plea of a prior engagement. She remembered being unable to meet Patroklos' hawk-yellow eyes, in case he was disappointed; and then the paralysing honey-slow joy of realising that he was quite as relieved as she was. "Karen's here somewhere with her young, and the last I saw of Ann she was talking to the vicar."

Bill grinned roguishly. "Actually I was looking for Rowan."

"She _should_ be here," said Nicola helplessly. "Try Ann, if I were you. I mean, try asking her where Rowan is, she'd probably know," she added, flushing as if she were no older than Fob. For some reason her sister Ann had never had much luck with men. It hadn't ever occurred to Nicola that Rowan did, either, but she realised to her astonishment that Bill Weasley and his convenient champagne and glasses were most definitely on the prowl.

"Thanks, I'll do that," he said, winked at her and strolled off, conjuring up another champagne glass on his way out.

Nicola drank some more champagne. For some reason she'd always thought it was rather acid and nasty, but this wasn't. It was like drinking moonlight. She considered Bill Weasley as a brother-in-law. She supposed it would mean having wretched Ginevra and the even more wretched young at every family gathering from now until Doomsday, but then they _already_ seemed to have pushed their way into her wedding, so perhaps it wouldn't be as different as all that...

There was some kind of commotion in the crowd outside. Nicola sat on her uneasy feelings, telling herself firmly that it couldn't _possibly_ be Ginty showing up after all in something that made Nicola's white column of a dress look hopelessly outdated and mumsy. Nevertheless, she retired to the dressing-table mirror. Her reflection gave her a friendly wink. "Drink up," it advised. "Put some colour in your cheeks."

The commotion was heading her way. Ginevra Weasley appeared to be at the head of it. Thinking cross, savage thoughts along the lines of _Her_ and _I should have known_, Nicola picked up her rustling skirts and went out into the foyer of the tent again. All of the figures in the tapestry, including the skeletons, were huddling together behind some trees. Even the purple carpet looked as if it was abasing itself.

Standing in the foyer were several burly wizards in very official-looking robes. One of them, a large woman with a bulldog jaw, gave Ginevra a push that almost knocked her over and stepped forward. Her beady eyes travelled up and down Nicola's costume, finishing with an incredulous glance at the veil. "Doxy wings are a controlled substance," she grated.

"They've been disinfected. What are you doing here, Millicent?"

"Lawrence Sophia Marlow. I apologise for interrupting this..." she scowled "... _happy_ occasion..."

"If you're here about our firstborn, we haven't got one yet. Come back at the christening," said Nicola with a sudden rush of unexpected, Tim-like bravado. "And besides, the role of bad fairy's already been filled. We've got Gilderoy Lockhart."

Millicent Bulstrode flexed some of the muscles in her jaw. Her minions bunched up threateningly behind her; all except one, a tall pale-eyed man, who offered Ginevra a polite hand up. Nicola was sure she knew him from somewhere, but she couldn't think where.

"This is no time for levity. I am here on official Ministry business, and I expect you to address me as Madam Bulstrode. Lawrence Sophia Marlow, you are accused of reckless and malicious Transfiguration; to wit, that on Sunday the nineteenth last, you did wilfully endanger Malcolm Aegidius Baddock..." She indicated a small minion at the back. Somewhat to Nicola's satisfaction, he still had a rather underslung chin and a tendency to open and shut his mouth whilst making wet popping noises. "...by causing him to take the form of an Atlantic cod."

Nicola fought a horrified, desperate desire to giggle. It was the curse of the family face again. Obviously Baddock had seen her and mistaken her for Lawrie. "I wasn't there," she said with what she hoped was the right tone of belligerent innocence. She'd never been able to fool McGonagall or Sprout with it. "I was..."

She realised that she had no idea at all where Lawrie had been that Sunday. "I was... Ginevra, where was I?"

"You were visiting some of the victims of the Battle of Hogsmeade, at St. Mungos," said Ginevra rather too quickly. Nicola could only hope that she didn't look as astonished as she felt. "They can confirm..."

"How convenient. I dare say half of those unfortunates will say that you visit them every night, and none of the rest could distinguish you from the late Dolores Umbridge or a winged tea-kettle," said Millicent nastily. "In the absence of any _believable_ alibi..."

"I'm sure the nurses and the doormen will tell you we were there," said Nicola as reasonably as she could.

"... In the absence of any _believable_ alibi," Millicent's voice rolled on, "you are required to surrender your wand to Mr Ollivander here that he may cast _Priori Incantatem_."

Nicola wished she hadn't had the champagne. She felt utterly out of options. She looked around for her wand. To her horror, she saw Ginevra handing it over to the Men from the Ministry. _Bloody_ Ginny Weasley, she'd been trying to do Nicola down since she first Petrified her, and now she seemed likely to finally manage it...

"There you are," said Ginevra, sounding improbably calm. "But it isn't her wand."

"What do you mean, it isn't her wand? No one asked you for _your_ wand, Miss Weasley. If I had my way, you wouldn't be allowed to carry one, even if that court did clear you of..."

"It isn't her wand," repeated Ginevra clearly. "It's her sister's wand. Something old, something new, _something borrowed_, something blue,"

"Quite so," said Mr Ollivander, insinuating himself forward with a rustle of robes and a faint smell of old cardboard boxes. "I remember this wand very well. Ten inches, hornbeam and unicorn hair. This was the second wand I sold..." he gave a slight, tilting bow, and she was _sure_ he knew, "... to _Nicola_ Marlow."

Millicent's chest swelled bossily in her heavy Ministry-issue robes. "So," she hissed, "_where is Lawrence Marlow's wand?_"

"I haven't got a clue. I haven't seen it since the hen night," said Nicola firmly.

Millicent gave her a baffled glare. "Not reporting the loss of a wand is _suspicious behaviour_," she said finally. "Very suspicious indeed. You can be sure that I will _look into this_. I suspect we will find the wand with the sister, and we will _get the truth out of her_." Gathering her minions about her, she swept out. Mr Ollivander gave Ginevra and Nicola a low bow to divide between them.

"That was quick thinking," said Nicola unwillingly. "About the something borrowed, I mean."

Ginevra looked down at her own shoes. "Look... Nicola..."

"I'm _so_ sorry, I got caught by Mummy F-F over by the vol-au-vents. I finally managed to palm the Weasley horrors off onto one of their uncles," said Susan, returning looking flushed but competent. "Oh, Ginevra. I'm sorry. I didn't see you."

"No, they are horrors, particularly Isolde and Wilhelmina," said Ginevra frankly. "She very nearly got called Bilia, and I have to say it would have suited her better. I'd better go and give Mum a hand with them. Bye." She hurried out, looking, as usual, very straight-backed and self-contained.

Susan swiped some crumbs off the bosom of her unobtrusively weddingy pastel satin robes. "Did I miss something?"

Nicola looked at the place where Ginevra had been. "I'm not sure."

\--

Nicola looked numbly over the twitching ears of the white pony she was supposed to be riding into the grove where the guests were waiting. At least the pony seemed to be a tractable beast, and willing to put up with such silliness as garlands of flowers which kept trying to break into rather squeaky song and a sidesaddle that had clearly been designed by the inventor of the chastity belt.

More flowers were draped over the branches of the trees, and the air felt oily and slightly sparkly with magic. Nicola looked at the tall back and carefully coiffed hair of Gilderoy Lockhart, and reflected that at least he was leading the pony rather than leading _her_, and that she didn't have to put up with him patting her hand any more. Which was a good thing, seeing as she'd told him that if he did that one more time she'd slug him. He had looked astonished and slightly hurt, and told her that Lawrie understood him much better.

Up ahead, she could see the murmuring crowds; and a set of solid, slightly hunched shoulders and a sandy head that was Peter; and a dark untidy upraised head that was Patroklos. She felt a smile lift her mouth. She had been worried that she would feel silly and Gintyish, as if she was play-acting, but she didn't, not in the least. She could already taste all the time-smoothed words of the wedding service in her mouth. Most of them, she thought, had been true for years; she was only _saying_ what was true, and putting the world right with it. He looked round, and she saw a sketch of winged dark brows against the sudden pallor of his face.

Someone somewhere started to play music, drowning out the tinny noise from the flowers. The pony started obediently forward at a rather ungraceful tug from Gilderoy Lockhart.

It was about then that Nicola realised; _she'd sent the Men from the Ministry off to Trennels_.

Her hands felt clammy on the pommel of the side-saddle. Lawrie's wand wouldn't carry any record of transfiguring Baddock... but Lawrie's wand was with Lawrie... and Lawrie was off helping a witch who had been in Dumbledore's inner councils escape, whilst she, Nicola, was supposed to be being a decoy.

And given the length of the service, it would be at least an hour before she could do anything about it.


	7. Chapter 7

For years, Rowan had associated half-past three in the morning with lambing; cold air in her ears and nose, cold mud clumping on her boots, and the blissful, painful warmth of coming back into a room with a fire. These days half-past three in the morning meant something else. Half-past three in the morning meant _tides_, once again, as it had when she was much younger and had gone out sailing with Giles in the crisp earliest morning; before she had become a landsman and turned her back on the sea.

In particular, three in the morning meant waiting for Peter to come back.

"If the damn boat's not here _this_ time..." she murmured to herself, turning her cocoa-mug about in her thin hands so as to warm palms and fingers both.

There were footsteps on the stairs. Rowan looked up, thought ridiculously _Oh... Nicola..._ and then realised that it was Lawrie. To be precise, it was Lawrie putting on a bravura display of knowing how to dress in the country. The elegantly longish wool skirt she was wearing had always hung at a depressing mid-calf on the taller Karen; her twinset had last been seen keeping company with Ginty, and the little silver fox-fur stole about her neck must, Rowan thought, have belonged to their grandmother. Rowan reflected that if they were all stuck in this house together much longer Lawrie would probably start raiding the attics for crinolines.

"I've packed him all the Gryffindor scarves I could find about the place. I thought they'd make him feel at home, and it's not as if any of you are likely to need them again," said Lawrie cheerfully. "There's one left that used to be Giles', but it's muffling a bit of the upstairs plumbing and I didn't want to move it in case it was important. He can't have the Hufflepuff ones, though, they're mine and Nick's."

"Lawrie, _honestly_, sometimes you're younger than Fob," said Rowan. "When I said _pack warm things_ I meant different kinds of warm things. You can't expect the poor man to wander round France dressed in nothing but Gryffindor scarves."

"I don't care what he wanders round in. I won't be in France to see it," said Lawrie, a piece of Ginty-like impudence that Rowan squashed with a look. Lawrie stood on one leg. "I know you said find some of Giles' old clothes, but Karen's had most of them to patch Chas' trousers."

Karen would have said _I'll look_ and relinquished her place in the warmth to the undeserving Lawrie. Rowan didn't see any reason why she should do anything of the kind. "Try the Old Shippen. There might be something packed away in there."

"I can't go in there, it's _Peter's_ place," said Lawrie, sounding as if she felt this was perfectly reasonable. "I don't see why we should give Percy Weasley all the wizarding money we have about the place, either. He can perfectly well find someone with a fireplace in France and Floo home. He'll probably be back before we are."

Rowan thought about trying to explain that the wizarding resistance on the other side of the Channel had grim memories of Grindelwald that weren't likely to heal any time _this_ generation and were unlikely to be sympathetic towards a Man from the Ministry. She only hoped, uneasily, that Peter and Luna between them could talk them out of practicing curses on him. Mostly her hopes rested on Peter. From the little Rowan had seen of Luna, she was the sort of woman who was invaluable in a crisis and a bloody nuisance all the rest of the time. She certainly wouldn't have chosen to be locked up with her in this uneasy calm house arrest for three days whilst they waited for the boat.

Then again, if she'd been given her choice of companions, she wouldn't have chosen Lawrie, either. "Go away and pack properly," she said firmly to her sister, who was showing signs of settling down by the fire. "I don't know why you left it this long and then decided to do it at this hour of the morning. Can't you sleep?"

Lawrie got the look in her eyes that heralded a really inventive explanation.

Peter's head appeared in the fireplace. "Snot fear," he said indistinctly. Someone at the other end evidently applied a strengthening charm to whatever makeshift fire they had lit in Bacca Cave; Peter's head appeared much more clearly. Rowan noticed that his hair was getting long enough to grow in a thick unbiddable cowlick across his forehead and resisted the temptation to pass him the kitchen scissors and tell him to deal with it.

"Boat's here," he said, grinning with relief. "I reckon I can keep this fire going another ten minutes. Some bastard's been at the firewood."

Rowan nodded competently. "Lawrie, go and wake Luna and bring the luggage. I'll... well, I suppose I'll have to _Accio_ the spare bed out of the cellar and tip Percy out of it. Move the table."

Lawrie looked irresolute. "But aren't we going to go and rescue the Abbotts?"

"Whatever gave you that idea?" Rowan started moving the table herself, one grudging scraping inch at a time, and reflected that she would never understand her sister Lawrie's ability to be devastatingly practical one minute and utterly the reverse the next. "I don't even know where Mr Perkins _took_ Hannah and Grace Abbott, and if you think that boat's going to wait whilst you go and infiltrate what Vincent Crabbe's henchman described as Base and drag Polly Abbott out of it like a slightly faded Eurydice in dire need of a cup of tea you have several more thinks coming. The _luggage_, Lawrie."

Lawrie hesitated. "But... but rescuing them is what a _proper_ resistance would do."

"I hope you never have any cause to find out what sort of thing _proper_ resistance movements have to do," said Rowan dispassionately. "We can save Luna. That'll have to do. Go and get her, and..."

But Luna was already in the kitchen doorway. One side of her hair was scraped up into an unflattering and insecure plait and coiled up over one ear; the other sprawled down over her shoulder like a case of dishwater-blonde dry rot. She was carrying a suitcase and buttoned into a boxy coat, and looked like an evacuee; except, Rowan thought, that evacuees didn't customarily wear a tomato-shaped felt pincushion as a brooch. Rowan felt vaguely annoyed at the sight of Luna's general limp disorder, and wished she didn't.

"I think you have a nest of Joobongs in your cellar," said Luna dreamily. "I heard them banging around. Once they get past the larval stage they feed off emanations, you know."

"I've never known a Joobong that didn't," said Rowan briskly. "Oh, for heavens' sake, Lawrie, _I'll_ get the suitcase for Percy. Where did you leave it? It'll give you two some time to say your goodbyes. Not too much time, mind. Peter can't keep that fire going forever."

She hurried up the stairs, lightly sure-footed in the dark, thinking that Peter and Lawrie must have unsuspected similarities considering that they both preferred such tiresome women. In the end it was some robes of Peter's that she flung into the suitcase and closed the latch firmly. By the time she returned the kitchen was empty. With the table pushed to one side and the fire at the far end it looked tiled and cavernous, like a great sleeping bread-oven.

Peter's head popped into view again. "Can't keep the fire going any longer," he said shortly. "Captain thinks he saw a broom. I'll get Miss Lovegood aboard and make contact again when I can. You be ready."

It was on the tip of Rowan's tongue to ask her brother when he thought she had ever failed to be ready, but she restrained herself. The cocoa had gone cold and scummy in the mug. She caressed the handle absently with one finger, wishing for once that it was lambing that was keeping her awake. Just at present, the certainties and unfairnesses of birth and death seemed much more welcoming than wondering whether she had done the right thing. Percy was loyal to the Ministry, and even though it was a completely misplaced loyalty, she had to respect it...

"For God's sake, woman, it isn't _that_ attractive a nose," she said fiercely to herself, aloud, as she went over to the sink to wash up her mug.

Some sixth sense made her reach for her wand. What had that wretched Lovegood woman said? Noises in the cellar. There was no reason at all for there to be noises in the cellar. There was no one in the cellar but...

"I'm very sorry, Rowan, but I'm going to have to ask you to drop that wand," said Percy Weasley. He was leaning against the doorway, but he too had a wand in his hand. Rowan found herself noticing that his hair was almost as unbiddable as Peter's and that she wanted to straighten the horn-rimmed spectacles. She wondered what on earth had come over her. Perhaps it was some lingering residue of Luna Lovegood that she wanted to exorcise by spreading aggressive tidiness. "I'm sure you're acting from what you believe are the best of motives, but..."

Rowan looked at the wand. She thought it probably belonged to Giles, and wondered where he had found it. She had enough to deal with, without Percy Weasley turning out to be unexpectedly resourceful. "You wouldn't use that on another Gryffindor," she said, playing for time, and figuring that it was worth a try.

He looked unhappy. "I'm afraid I would."

"Yes, I thought you might. I'm afraid I would, too," said Rowan apologetically. "And you know I did Duelling Club all that time you were doing extra-credit work for your OWLs. I don't want to hex you."

"I suppose you didn't want to tie me to a bed in your cellar, either!" he said rather bitterly.

Rowan caught herself thinking _Well, actually_ and had to fight an unsuitable desire to lean one narrow hip-bone against the enamelled sink and giggle. "Percy, you do know what Secretary to the Wizengamot Avery would have done to the people I've helped escape, don't you? You know what's already been done in his name. I don't care what the Ministry used to be, I care about what it's turned into. You're choosing to support him. You should take responsibility for that."

"You can't discard the whole system just because of a few bad decisions," he said steadily. "That's... that's as bad as Dumbledore. I can't say I agree with everything Secretary Avery's done, but there are... there are checks and balances. Laws. Courts. _Procedures_. Dumbledore would have made himself a dictator, and that would have been worse. Much worse."

"Neither you nor I have the power to discard the system, more's the pity," said Rowan, deftly sidestepping the issue of Albus Dumbledore, on which her views were distinctly mixed. "The Ministry is Disappearing people we were at school with, and it's not as if Disappearing is the worst of it. You can't tell me your brother Ron was evil."

"No," he said softly. "But at least I can tell you that the rest of my family are alive." He drew himself up to his full height, looking desperate and not undignified. "I do what I can for them. If I get called names by people with stiffer backs than me... well, that's just part of doing what I can."

Rowan was strongly tempted to ask if there _were_ people with stiffer backs than Percy and if so on what continent they lived, but thought it might seem impolite.

The fire flickered up again. Both of them turned to look at it, wand-hands remaining poised ridiculously in place. Rowan felt relief die and curdle and slide, horribly coldly, down her throat. It wasn't Peter's face. It was Lawrie's. She looked hollow-eyed in the firelight and very young. _Younger than Fob in any number of ways_, thought Rowan, wishing she'd never let Lawrie get involved in any of this at all.

"It was Vincent Crabbe," said Lawrie, sounding astonished but businesslike. "I don't know what he's done to Peter, but he's still breathing. Peter, I mean. He looks really weird, though. He's gone all pale and ghastly, and something's happened to his face, he looks like those pictures Mummy showed us of our uncles we haven't got because they died. Luna's away safe. I'm going after him. I think I've got a _plan_."

As her face faded away among the flames, she gave a brave, daring smile; exactly the smile a heroine _should_ produce at a time like this, compounded of equal parts of honour and recklessness. The only thing that could have improved it would have been a dashing little military hat.

"Damn. Blow. Blast-and-bloody-hell," said Rowan, borrowing her swearwords from Nicola. "I'm not letting her traipse off into a nest of Death Eaters."

She looked at Percy, her eyes very blue, and gave him a calm soldierly little nod like a duellist acknowledging an opponent. "I'm going after her. That'll mean I'll turn my back on you, and you can hex me. That'll be what the Ministry wants you to do. Of course, then they'll have to clear up the mess when Vincent Crabbe Disappears Lawrence S. Marlow. I wouldn't wonder if the headquarters of the Knights of Walpurgis got mobbed by indignant fans. That'd be your problem, though, not mine. Your move, I believe, Mr Weasley."


	8. Chapter 8

Her father, her stepmother, her sister Rose, a variety of Help from the Village and a vicar in trainers who had visited the Colebridge Grammars to give a very worthy talk on the subject of Strangers had all told Phoebe Dodd that she shouldn't unlock the door at night if she didn't know who it was. Fob had listened to all of them with the same expression of more or less respectful glumness (most respectful for her father, least so for Rose) and, as she padded slippered down the stairs, heeded their advice; but this wasn't a Stranger, this was Peter in trouble, or at the very least Rowan. She knew it in her bones. She picked through her stepmother's silly, perfumed handbag, extracted the keys with a neatness that was surprising in such large stubbed-off fingers, and opened the front door.

Standing in the doorway was a very impressive witch in flowing robes of a majestic dark violet. She was about the size of two Fobs standing on each others' shoulders. Fob had to fight a terrible urge to croak _I didn't know Vincent had a sister_. Behind her stood more wizards, formed up like an honour guard. The chill of the night crept in over the threshold. The cold pale sky was turning paler in long ribbons of cloud towards the horizon; rumours of dawn.

"I suppose you know that there is a quite unauthorised Switching Spell on your fireplace," snapped the majestic witch, shaking a small newt out of her damp sleeve. Fob had the horrible idea that it might be the last person whose doorstep she had visited. "My team and I were forced to make an unscheduled detour via the Shetland Islands, which has _delayed us in the performance of our duty_."

Fob did have a vague memory of Karen enchanting the fireplace. She practiced looking elaborately and lumpenly stupid. The witch looked annoyed. "My name is Madam Bulstrode, child. I am here under the auspices of the Ministry of Magic, Misuse of Wands Division, and I intend to question Nicola Marlow."

"Not here," mumbled Fob and attempted to shut the door.

The witch put a foot in the way. The foot was at least the size of one of Peter's gumboots, and sheathed in spike-heeled boots made of the dark purple skin of some kind of reptile. Whatever the skin had come from, the pattern on it was _still moving_, and one of the spike heels speared the remains of another newt.

Fob was large and strong for her age, but the witch outside was larger and stronger and older; the door stayed open. The witch glared down at Fob. "Since she is not at her home, which I consider _suspicious behaviour_ at a time of national crisis like this, I intend to speak to her sister. She obviously has _something to hide_, or she would not have allowed those spells to be cast on her fireplace. I feel sure that the end of it will be that you will _all_ be taken into custody. The best thing you can do is to come clean at once." She leaned downwards. A nauseating waft of perfume with a lot of patchouli and pine in it got into Fob's nose and mouth and made her choke. "Where is Madam Dodd?"

"The child's an idiot," said someone at the back. "I don't _remember_ Karen Marlow marrying into the Goyles,"

"She was a dreadful Head Girl," said somebody else.

"The Goyles may have their own troubles, but I have yet to learn that they consort with anyone but their own pureblooded kind. Very likely the child's just a Muggle." The large witch retrieved a wand of a size and heft that looked as if she customarily unblocked drains with it, and dealt Fob a stinging tap on the cheek. "Find. Madam. Dodd."

A door opened behind Fob. A middle-aged wizard in gamboge robes emerged from the kitchen. He had a friendly, tired face that looked familiar. "Mr Ollivander, I think you should take a look at this," said "I can't be certain myself, but I think it's a centaur tail hair."

Fob blinked at him, not recognising him at first; then she realised what a change a few square meals and a haircut had made to Mr Perkins. She began to burn inside with what she herself didn't quite recognise as the slow-stoked beginnings of a furious temper.

"Thank you, Perkins," said Madam Bulstrode. She pushed Fob aside and back onto the stairs with a meaty shove of her well-manicured hand. "We have _evidence_."

"Of what? That Miss Blake visits?" said Fob scornfully. "Everyone knows she's got a centaur-tail hairpiece. She keeps telling people. She showed me her bald scalp once, it was foul. I can see up your nostrils, they're all hairy. You should see if Miss Blake wants them for another wig."

"The origin of that centaur hair can be _verified_, child," Madam Bulstrode leaned over Fob. Another waft of perfume very nearly asphyxiated her. "Dunstan, the Veritaserum, if you please."

One of her minions looked nervous. "Ah... the Blakes are a very old wizarding family, Madam Bulstrode, and the Veritaserum's restricted. We already used three ampoules on that crofter and those trout fishermen, and if we go through more than five doses in a twenty-four-hour period I have to submit a blue 75A _and_ a purple 75AA. In triplicate. And you know what the purple ones are like for sprouting wings inside the filing cabinet and then flying off the moment you open..."

The stairs poked uncomfortably into Fob's back. Madam Bulstrode's large beringed hand was still pinning her shoulder. Fob began to notice that she was breathing faster than usual. She was very angry indeed with Mr Perkins. He had betrayed their trust, he had been the cause of all the trouble with stupid Mrs Abbott, he had put Peter in danger.

He put Peter in danger.

"The Veritaserum, Dunstan," said Madam Bulstrode. Her face was turning purple with anger, in a mottled way that reminded Fob of the spike-heeled boots. The mottling went all the way down into her cleavage and all the way up behind her slightly hairy ears. She turned away, presumably to wither the upstart Dunstan with a flick of her wand.

He put _Peter_ in _danger_. Fob rolled herself sideways and bit Madam Bulstrode just above her fleshy wrist. She felt skin and fat give way, vilely springy, under her teeth. The perfume got into her mouth and tasted repellent. Madam Bulstrode raised her wand. "Cruci..."

"Impedimenta!" came a clear, firm, above all _prefectly_ voice from upstairs. Madam Bulstrode froze. For a moment her arm became a dead weight, pressing down even harder on Fob's abused shoulder, and then it stopped weighing anything at all.

Fob rolled her eyes upwards and saw, in extremely forced perspective, her stepmother standing at the top of the stairs in a candlewick dressing-gown. Rose was standing behind her. She looked as if she had been crying, though it was hard to tell from this angle and besides, lately Rose always looked as if she had been crying. She was holding something in her arms.

Fob had never been gladder to see her stepmother in her life, though on the whole she could take or leave Rose.

Dunstan, Perkins and a pert-looking female minion were all raising their wands. Mr Ollivander was standing back in the doorway and holding his hat in both hands like an undertaker, an expression of faint amusement in his face. Karen opened her mouth to say something else.

Fob rolled sideways. She felt as if she was rolling through water. As she rolled off the stairs, she hunched her shoulders and put her head forward and charged Mr Perkins' legs. He put Peter in danger and she wasn't going to stop until he was _sorry_.

Mr Perkins looked down and shouted something that made her feel as if she was running through _glue_. Fob lunged forward and tackled him around the legs. Her head connected with his kneebones with a really satisfying sort of pain that felt as if it had shaken all the remaining droplets of that foul perfume off her skin. He toppled backwards. Fob fell on top of him. She was beginning to lose all feeling in her feet. She felt the spell tightening itself around her.

With the last of her momentum, but nothing like the last of her fury, she reached up across the gamboge steppe of his robes, saw what she thought was probably the appropriate place, grabbed and _twisted._ She was glad to have the material of the robes between her hand and his skin. It still felt very nasty. Still, the look on his face was in every way worth it.

"There's four of us, and we've got the little Muggle girl. You can't win," said the pert-looking female minion, who didn't look much older than Rose.

"I passed Defence against the Dark Arts with the highest honours in my year, Orla Quirke," said Karen hotly. "I never expected to use it in defence against the Ministry."

"Dear lady," began Mr Ollivander. "If I might take a moment of your time. You must consider..."

"Stop t-talking about all that wizarding stuff!" howled Rose, her voice breaking at the end into an unlovely snuffling scream. Fob wondered why it was that she couldn't move but she could still hear. Perhaps nothing inside her eardrums needed to move. They'd done that last term at the Grammar, alternately with Geography which mostly seemed to be glaciers, but she hadn't been paying attention.

She could only see Rose out of the corner of one eye, but she recognised now what her sister was holding up. It was a large, plush white teddy bear with a sentimental expression on its face and an overstuffed satin heart cradled in its arms. Fob had always hated it and made fun of it whenever she could, accusing it - most unfairly -of being the sort of thing her step-aunt Ann would like.

Rose wiped her nose on her sleeve, took another snuffling breath and stepped forward to the edge of the stairs, holding her calm about her like a terrible cloak. "Vincent gave me this to _protect_ me against wizards like you. I don't know what it does but I bet it's something horrible," she said, brandishing the teddy bear. "And he may have broken up with me, and I may h-h-hate him, but he still killed Draco Malfoy and I bet this'll kill at least one of you. And you deserve it. I know what _Crucio_ means."

Fob thought her stepmother had turned a little whiter, though it was hard to tell.

"Take them and go," said Karen unsteadily, looking at Mr Ollivander. "I don't know the Ministry's official stance on what happened to that poor Malfoy child, but I'm sure it'll be dealt with at higher levels than a missing wand."

"Indeed," Mr Ollivander bowed to her, sinuously. "I feel _sure_ there are those with greater knowledge than I concerning the matter of the Malfoy Heir."

"Yes, very likely," said Karen, running a bothered hand up through her hair. "Thank you. Yes. _Go_."

Dunstan and Orla Quirke hurried forward to move the inert, helium-balloon-like bulk of Madam Bulstrode. Both of them looked embarrassed, as if they had suddenly realised that they were in someone else's house and ought to be on their best behaviour. Mr Perkins untangled himself from Fob. Fob's fingers and toes began to tingle unpleasantly. She supposed it was the magic wearing off. Rose sat down in a plump, leggy heap at the top of the stairs and began to cry in a loud, unfocused manner, as if she wasn't sure what else to do. Fob scrambled to her knees. She was pleased to notice that Mr Perkins was still wincing, and walking with a distinctly crablike gait.

Rose raised a hand to rub her eyes again. Her other hand fumbled its grip around the teddy bear. Karen looked appalled, and began to murmur something, waving her wand in hasty swoops and flourishes.

The teddy bear started to roll down the stairs.

\--

"Oh, honestly, Lawrie, what are you doing?" demanded Rowan; not unreasonably, as her sister the famous actress was sitting on the floor in her knickers, busily enchanting the wool skirt.

"Need _trousers_," said Lawrie indistinctly, giving the impression of having a mouthful of pins even though she had actually made all necessary alterations with a spell that she had learnt in her schooldays from Elizabeth Collins. "H'lo, Percy."

Percy looked away, embarrassed by Lawrie's bare legs. "You know, I'm still not sure this is a good idea..." he began, pushing his glasses up his nose.

"Oh, have you joined us now?" asked Lawrie brightly, scrambling into the trousers. Rowan remembered Lawrie as being prone to annoying fits of maidenliness in this kind of situation, but evidently either she felt Percy's maidenliness trumped her own or she regarded him in the light of a rather uninteresting extension of Ginevra. "Well, if you have, you may as well have some fun with it. _I_ plan to."

Rowan knelt over the prone form of Peter. He was lying in the cold shadows at the edge of the cave. Still breathing, she thought with relief, though he did look quite peculiar; his skin had gone an ashy grey, and his hair and features were much darker and longer-boned than she remembered. He was still, most definitely, Peter, but he looked like a Peter who might have been born if their mother had married a Maunsell cousin. Rowan pressed two cold but competent fingers to the base of his neck, looking for a pulse, and found a chain instead. She had _never_ thought of Peter as the necklace-wearing type. Scooping the rest of the necklace up out of his shirt, she found a tiny silver hourglass on a chain.

"Oh, dear," she said inadequately, and scolded herself inwardly for such an Annish utterance. "I think whatever spell Vincent used on him must have rebounded somehow off _this_."

"He must have been using it to get to the wedding," said Lawrie, sounding interested. "I didn't know he had one. I wish _I_ had one. I could have gone along in disguise and watched myself get married, and heard all the nice things people had to say about me. _Doesn't_ she look divine in that dress, my dear, and _can't_ you see how brave Gilderoy Lockhart is being about losing his Ganymede..." She did a little prancing twirl.

"Stop that, you're upsetting your sister," said Percy heavily. Lawrie looked astonished.

Rowan weighed the Time-Turner in the palm of her hand. It didn't _look_ damaged. She wished that if this _was_ some alternate Peter, he'd had the sense to get a Time-Turner in gold or something so that it was obvious. She also wished rather nastily that the alternate Ginty still hadn't managed to get brown eyes and chestnut hair. "I wonder whether he's been to the wedding yet?" she said aloud, even worse possibilities unfolding themselves in front of her.

"Well, he must have been, mustn't he?" said Lawrie in her stands-to-reason voice. "Or he wouldn't be here."

"Not necessarily," said Rowan grimly. "Lawrie, do you remember what Vincent used to curse him with?"

"It wasn't a spell I knew. I'm going to borrow the wand motion and the look on his face, though, if I ever play You-Know-"

"_Lawrence_!" said Percy, looking properly shocked.

Rowan looked round, recognising with a sisterly eye that Lawrie was still shocky from the fright she had had and was burning off the charge, so to speak, by saying outrageous things; and that whilst it was a nuisance, there were other much more inconvenient things her sister could be doing, such as bursting into tears or insisting on going back to London _this instant_ or both. "You're only encouraging her, you know," she said unemotionally, rising to her feet and dusting off the knees of her jeans. "Lawrie, _what did Vincent say?_"

Lawrie contorted her face into a goblin-like frown of concentration. "Kallikakare," she said finally. "Kallikakatus, maybe. Kallikakorum. Something like that."

"It's not one I know." Rowan looked up at Percy, reflecting that it was rather pleasant to have someone that tall around and almost like having Giles back. "Percy?"

He shook his head. "It's at least partly Greek at the root rather than Latin, but that doesn't tell you anything. From the middle of the eighteenth century people have been mixing up the languages to a quite shocking extent. Something to do with good and bad, but..."

"So's everything," said Rowan briskly and with an inattention to grammar that echoed her eighteenth-century forebears. She pointed her wand at the sad remains of the fire. "_Evanesco_. Well, I doubt anyone's going to let us into the Hogwarts library to look it up there - supposing the place still has one brick on top of another, which I also very much doubt - so we'd better do the next best thing."

"What's that?" asked Lawrie obligingly, her theatrical training having taught her to recognise the necessity of providing a feed line from time to time.

"Ask Karen." Rowan looked down again at Peter, grimly. "I'll take his shoulders, Lal, and you take his legs..."

"I'll carry him," offered Percy.

"Really?" Rowan, for once, looked disconcerted. "Oh."


	9. Chapter 9

The teddy bear bounced against a step. Rose made a long arm to try to hook it back. The air turned thick and syrupy with magic. Fob booted the kitchen door open and dived through it.

There was a long, ominous roll of noise that made Fob feel as if she was being sucked underneath a wave, and then a soft _pop_.

Fob opened the kitchen door. Her first thought was that it looked as if someone had fallen over on the top step whilst carrying a basket of washing and spilt it down the stairs. Madam Bulstrode's purple robes lay like a carpet of state across the bottom few steps. The oversized t-shirt Rose slept in was further up. Mr Perkins' gamboge robe lay in the corridor. Fob gave it a nervous, disliking look. Inside the robe something moved.

Fob bounced back into the kitchen and grabbed the nearest implement, which turned out to be a bread-knife. She stood clutching it for a while. When nothing happened, she poked the robe with it.

Something brown and tentacular wriggled out through the robe's neckhole. Fob wished whole-heartedly that she had never come across any of the baffling Japanese comics Chas kept in his bedroom and was suddenly glad that she wasn't wearing the uniform of the Colebridge Girls' Grammar. She took a cautious step back towards the kitchen, thinking firm thoughts that had nothing to do with tentacles.

Even when relations were at their frostiest between Rowan and Kay, she couldn't imagine Rowan setting Madam Bulstrode on them, so that meant Trennels had to be empty, which meant... Fob's heart thumped. _The boat had come_. She kept a narrow eye on the emerging tentacle. It seemed to be squirming through its own mucus. Fortunately it wasn't getting much thicker, which was, she supposed, one good thing if she didn't think thoughts like _that means it can get under doors_.

The tentacle suddenly resolved itself into a ten-inch-long brown worm of inoffensive demeanour. Fob looked around wildly and noticed another one climbing up the newel post.

"I bet they're poisonous, or something, if I know that Vincent," she muttered, putting on a pair of gardening gloves and looking for a handy receptacle to collect them in. "Or they have tiny hairs that snap off and creep into your bloodstream. Or something. _There_ you go, Mr Perkins," She dropped the wriggling thing into a Kilner jar. She was strongly tempted to screw the lid shut on top, but she resisted the urge and made a neat lid with a rubber band and a square of waxed paper pierced with a fork, as if it was one of Chas' stick-insects.

The boat had come. Fob started whistling to herself. Of course, she wished she was there with Peter, but at least now that Luna Lovegood person was out of the house. It was plain to Fob, even if everyone else was blinded by adulthood and general inattentiveness, that Miss Lovegood and Auntie Lawrie held about as much attraction for each other as a pair of lawn chairs, and she _strongly_ suspected that Miss Lovegood had been after Peter instead. Otherwise, she wouldn't have hung around him asking so many questions, which clearly _weren't_ for the Quibbler, because anyone who read the Quibbler could see that the writers just made it up.

"Someone's been at this door with an _Alohomora_," said a voice at the kitchen door, sounding calmly resigned about it. "Kay? Kay, are you there?"

"Rowan!" Fob plunged delightedly back into the kitchen. Fob had never been one for hugging people, nor Rowan for offering hugs, but it was a close-run thing. Fob tucked one foot unsteadily behind the other and stuck out her hand for a handshake instead.

Then she saw who was behind Rowan. Lawrie was an irrelevance. Fob ignored her. She stared past her, turning balky with panic. An unfamiliar red-headed wizard in spectacles was carrying a body. She recognised the heavy droop of that arm, looking suddenly fragile in the sleeve of the guernsey, the shape of ear and chin and hairline lolled confidingly against the unfamiliar wizard's robes. It wasn't so much that this was always what her nightmares looked like, as that this was what her nightmares always _would_ look like from now on. Peter's hair looked strangely dark. Perhaps it was wet.

She wanted to kick and bite the wizard in spectacles, even more than she had wanted to hurt Mr Perkins. "What's happened?" she asked deeply. "Don't use baby words, and don't say things like _passed away_. Tell me."

"He's still alive. Vincent cursed him. Percy, put him down in that chair," said Rowan. She looked at the gardening glove, and then at the Kilner jars stacked on the table. "Fob, what are you doing with all those Flobberworms?"

"Crabbe cursed them, too, I'll bet," said Lawrie enthusiastically. "He always did have a thing about Flobberworms. He said one bit him once, though I always thought he just got a lovebite off Goyle and was too embarrassed to admit it."

"Oh, I remember Crabbe," said Percy grimly. "Never washed his neck - admittedly, there was a lot of it to wash, but that's no excuse - and always creeping out of cupboards without a decent explanation."

Fob glared at him, disgusted with their lack of attention to the matter at hand. "What about Peter? Is he going to be all right?" If she had been alone in the kitchen she might have taken Peter's hand and rubbed it against her cheek; as it was, she stood foursquare and shared the glare around her relatives, her solid face redder and unhappier than ever.

"I don't know. If we manage to remove the curse, very probably," said Rowan. Fob looked up at her under her stumpy lashes and then decided to be satisfied with that, for the time being. Some of her feelings had got all ready to be aggrieved, but were balked by Rowan's particular brand of clear-eyed honesty. They all seemed to be sulking inside her head at not being needed. It was quite uncomfortable.

Rowan looked back at the jars. "What about these Flobberworms?"

Fob drew circles on the floor with the toe of one slipper and explained.

Rowan looked grim. "So, this one's definitely Mr Perkins - "

"What, not Perkins who used to work in Misuse of Muggle Artifacts?" interrupted Percy, looking shocked.

" - but you have no idea which of the rest of these Flobberworms are Kay and Rose, and which are Quirke and Dunstan and that nasty piece of work Millicent Bulstrode and Mr Ollivander?"

"Actually there aren't enough to be all of them," explained Fob, not very clearly. "I think Mr Ollivander might have got out at the front and shut the door."

Rowan looked briefly annoyed and then shook her head, dismissing Mr Ollivander. She tapped one of the jars sharply with a finger. "Karen?"

One of the Flobberworms waved its tail. Another one wagged its head. A third squirted mucus at the glass, causing Lawrie to say that she bet that one was Millicent.

"Oh, this is hopeless," said Rowan. "I'm just going to have to look through Karen's books."

"Did she keep them indexed?" asked Percy.

Rowan raised one pale eyebrow at him. "What do you think?"

"Well, I remember that she used to leave books all over the common room. I once tidied Neville Longbottom away in the middle of a pile of them, after Fred and George had inveigled him into eating something that turned him into a Latin Grammar, and he had to spend a night naked in the library," said Percy, frowning darkly. "I have a spell that can search through her book collection. It'll take longer to search if the books aren't indexed, and if it has to work through any counter-hexes, but it might still work."

"Oh, that sounds like the thing Ginevra uses to look through the files, the one that sounds from its vocal like it ought to be a _lot_ more interesting." said Lawrie happily. "She didn't tell me you invented it, but I suppose I should have guessed."

"_Lawrie_," said Rowan squashingly.

Percy shrugged and flicked his wand. "_Pervestigo!_"

"Never mind the books. We have to go after horrible Vincent and find out what he did to Peter," stated Fob. "You do, anyway. I'll stay and look after him."

Rowan, who had clearly been expecting several exhausting rounds of _Can't I go too_, gave Fob a long considering look. "Yes. All right. As long as you let me put protective wards all around the house, and promise me that if anything else goes wrong you'll call... well, the Miss Blakes, I suppose. I don't agree with all their views by a long shot, but when it comes to a wizard's home being his castle, you couldn't have a better hand to the moat and drawbridge than Fenella Blake. Or a better shot over the battlements than Maud."

"Much better call Ginevra," said Lawrie, who had taken what Fob considered unfeeling advantage of the kitchen to make herself a sandwich.

Percy looked as if he was about to say something. When he did, it sounded as if his robes were too tight around his throat. "Well, she was... she was always very talented at hexes..."

Rowan's hand closed briefly over his. "Oh, just let them grow up," she advised with a surprising flash of a smile. "They will anyway, you know."

"Ron won't."

"I know. Sorry. _Damn_." Rowan rose rather hurriedly from the table.

When she returned, Fob stared at her, not sure whether to be outraged or impressed. "You've got _lipstick_ on!"

"If you can call it that, yes," said Rowan, sounding off-hand. "It's been nothing but a stub for years and now it's nothing but a scrape. Come along, Lawrie."

"It looks much better on you than on Rose."

"You are a horrid child," said Lawrie detachedly.

"Who _could_ she have learned that from?" wondered Rowan briskly to the air at large. Lawrie looked hugely indignant. "Fob, stay here whilst I secure the house."

Fob stayed in the suddenly empty kitchen. She took Peter's hand, telling herself that she was just taking his pulse.

"Kallikakare, Kallikakatus, Kallikakorum, not found," squawked a tinny voice out of thin air. "Did you mean to search for the Knee-Reversing Hex?"

"No, I didn't, you horrible thing," muttered Fob. Her eyes felt hot and leaky and fuzzy and generally like a pair of perished hot-water-bottles. She leaned down and rubbed her cheek against Peter's hand.

\--

"I never thought I'd have cause to thank my respected ancestors for filling this place with decommissioned weaponry," murmured Rowan to herself as she loaded and sighted a First World War-era pistol that she had found in a drawer in the library . She looked up. Someone was standing in the gloom of the doorway in an expensive cream-coloured suit and what looked like a wedding veil. Remembering _never, never let your gun / pointed be at anyone_, she let her arm drop, which made her feel exactly as if she was starting the Grand National. "Lawrie, I told you to go and scry for Vincent's wretched Base, not dress up as Miss Havisham, though I have to say it's exactly like you to have your going-away outfit delivered to you and not Nicola."

"I'm Nicola," said Nicola. "I came by broom."

"In that skirt?"

"Yes, well, you should have seen the alternative," said Nicola tartly. "Don't even start about the veil. All I can say is that when Susan Bones uses an _Adhero_ things stay adhered, and that I wasn't ready to tear my hair out."

"You're one up on me, then," said Rowan. "Nick, what are you _doing_ here? Because, really, if you've fled from your honeymoon in horror and you think my brief foray into breeding horses equips me to sit you down and give you a _talk_ about it, you really have gravely mistaken my area of expertise. I always thought you and Patroklos sorted that out between you with a spell here and there, and I don't need to know any more. My life is already quite agricultural enough."

"Certainly not," said Nicola, sounding revived. "Millicent Bulstrode's coming here with a lot of Men from the Ministry looking for Lawrie's wand. Ginevra told her..."

"Yes, well, never mind Ginevra," said Rowan. "As for Millicent Bulstrode, she's been turned into a Flobberworm and she's in Kay's kitchen."

"Oh," Nicola looked discomposed. She flung herself down into one of the big library chairs. "You have been busy. You should have been at the wedding, Bill Weasley was looking for you."

"_Bill_ was? Well, now. Here, Nick, have you still got that service revolver?"

"Yes," said Nicola grimly. "Patroklos invited Giavone to the wedding. You remember, the one who..."

"Nick, frankly, when it comes to centaurs, the only thing that surprises me is anyone discovering one they _can_ put up with, rather than the reverse," said Rowan. "Peter's been cursed. Do you know a spell that goes _Kallikakare_ or something like it? And I don't suppose that Baddock object told you where Base was?"

"Might Vincent have told Rose?"

"That would almost be a good idea, except that Rose is also a Flobberworm."

Nicola blinked. Now _that_ was a story to ask Rowan for, another time. "It might not even be around here, anyway. They might have used the Floo Network, or a Portkey, or Apparated. Though most of Vincent's Boys didn't look old enough to be Apparating about safely. When I was at Kay's..." She looked up, a sudden kindling glint in her eyes, clapped a hand to the veil that still decorated her hair, and rushed out.

"Mad," said Rowan to her back. "Quite mad. And were those _Doxy wings_ on the veil?"

She stowed the pistol away neatly and rifled the rest of the drawers. Nothing half as useful came to hand. The pistol was the best find so far, along with various even more antique armaments and a cache of wizarding fireworks that Lawrie had unexpectedly unearthed under Giles' bed. Rowan shoved her hands in her pockets and strolled out, wondering with her usual detached interest exactly what kind of an idea Nicola had been blessed with this time.

\--

"Miss Maud is always having this trouble!" squeaked Totty excitedly. She was precariously perched some feet above the kitchen table, on top of a fragile tower built of cereal boxes, old bound volumes of _Horse and Hound_ and at the very bottom the upturned washing-up bowl. "Miss Maud is forever sticking her wig on for a long day's hunting and then asking Totty to unstick it! You is coming to just the right place, Miss Nicola! You hold on, and Totty will be having it all unstuck before your sister is coming back. Totty is _quite understanding_ about you not wanting Miss Lawrie to see you trying on her veil. Miss Fenella was being Disappointed in Love once too, though Totty is saying it as shouldn't. He was being a perpetual curate." Totty gave a joyous, juicy sniff at the memory. "Totty will not be telling anyone!"

"I don't suppose anything goes on in this neighbourhood that you don't know about, Totty," said Nicola with artful flattery and a strong hope that Totty remembered that she, unlike Miss Blake, didn't wear a wig.

"Totty is only being a humble house-elf," said Totty reprovingly. "You will be holding still now, and not wriggling, if you please, Miss Nicola. Totty is not wanting to be accidentally taking one of your ears off. Totty would have to be pegging herself to the washing-line by her own ears for a _week_ if she did that. Bad Totty! Bad Totty!"

The tower made a disturbing rocking noise. Nicola hoped that Totty didn't knock it over. She struggled back to the point at hand. "What I mean is, I bet nobody could get away with much around here. If there was anyone... um... shooting the Miss Blakes' foxes or something. Or gangs of boys hanging around. I'm sure you'd notice."

"Totty would be noticing," agreed Totty smugly. "Totty is knowing when wizards with brooms go into Miss Culver's pigeon-house. Miss Maud is not thinking much of Miss Culver. Miss Maud is saying Miss Culver is _not proper county_, no, nor will be, not even when her bones have rotted to mush."

"Gosh," said Nicola inadequately, resisting an urge to bat away the small fingers that were spidering itchily over her scalp. "Those would be quite _old_ wizards, I suppose?"

"Oh, no, Miss Nicola, very young wizards! One of them was going in there once carrying a fish. That is not at all a proper way of going on. Totty knows. Pigeons are not eating fish, nor are fish eating pigeons, not since Miss Maud's grandfather gave up breeding ornamental carp. You be holding still whilst Totty is lifting it away." The small fingers receded, to Nicola's great relief. She still wished she had time to go and wash her hair. More than that, she wished Patroklos was here. She shook her head, trying to get rid of the last clinging feel of the tulle and the self-pity both at once. She had spent a long time managing without Patroklos and she doubted this time would be the last.

At least she had a small store of comforts. The way Patroklos had turned to her as he said _to have and to hold from this day forward_, smiling in that the faint almost mocking way that he paradoxically did whenever he was most serious; the memory of how her heart had skipped as she very nearly said _I, Nicola_ and not _I, Lawrence Sybil_ and then wondered whether Lawrie wouldn't have said _Lawrence Sophia_ instead; the ring on her finger.

_The ring on her finger_. Nicola clasped her right hand hastily over her left and hoped Totty would put that down as another bit of sad spinsterish dressing-up. It was too much to hope that she hadn't noticed. Totty was, and always would be, a looker for wedding-rings on fingers, just as she was a beady-eyed counter of months between wedding and confinement.

Totty lifted the veil away and shook it out admiringly. It was long enough to reach to her feet. "Totty will be folding this carefully and putting it away for Miss Lawrie. For Mrs. Lawrie, Totty should be saying, though if centaurs are having surnames Totty is not knowing know what they may be. Bad, ignorant Totty!" Totty stamped on her own toes, an operation that brought down the tower altogether. Totty disappeared in mid-air with a squawk.

Nicola gathered up the boxes and the washing-up bowl and put them neatly back in their accustomed places, and then stood looking at the squared-off pile of bound volumes of _Horse and Hound_. She didn't know where they lived. The thought made her feel abruptly as if Trennels had rolled away from her like the earth from the sun.

"And so what if it has? It'll roll a sight further when Giles brings home a wife and children," she said briskly, finding the word _wife_ really quite strange to say now she supposed she was one herself. She stacked the books again neatly and put them on the dresser. "Rowan! Who's Miss Culver, and what about her pigeon-house?"


	10. Chapter 10

Nicola felt sleep stealing up on her like a soft assassin. The bentwood chair wasn't very comfortable, but her legs felt warm and leaden with the ache of flying, familiar and unfamiliar at once, and her shoulders seemed to have melted themselves into place against the back of the chair. Her eyes throbbed. She closed them.

Something pushed itself against her hand. Nicola gave a convulsive jump. Still half convinced that she was on her broom, she put a hand out to steady herself; found nothing but air, gulped, woke up completely and was very glad no one had been there to see her. Cindy, the cat, looked up at her with golden imperative eyes in a flat grey face. Nicola stared back stupidly. Cindy slotted her skull under Nicola's hand again, slitting her eyes and making crooning noises.

"_I come, Graymalkin - Paddock calls_ \- Yes, all right, I'll feed you." Nicola pried open the fridge and scanned for leftovers.

"Oh, there you are! Rowan, the Scrying Spell won't work on the map I've got. I need the road-atlas out of the farm Landie. I can't go and get it myself, the lane's full of sheep," Lawrie, in full cry, skidded into the kitchen. She came to a halt and stared at her twin, astonished outrage just about capped by delight. Nicola blinked, surprised and flattered. She hadn't expected _Lal_ to be so glad to see her...

"You look like _me_ again!" crowed Lawrie. She scooped Cindy up with a ruthless hand round her middle. Cindy went protestingly limp and looked immeasurably affronted, dangling between Lawrie's hands as she was waltzed round the kitchen. "_Ha!_ I couldn't stand that horrible bun-thing of yours. It made you look like Kay. Don't you think it's _dreggy_ that everyone else got curls except us and Peter? It took me _years_ to work out that Rowan was charming hers straight, she really hates it when people think she's vain..."

"She's out in the cold, cold snow at all hours clamping mangolds, she's got a right to be a bit of vanity," said Nicola with detached disfavour. "You really are a horrible, self-centred little oik, you know."

Lawrie looked at her under her lashes, but evidently decided against noisy outrage in favour of ostentatious tact in the face of a belated case of wedding nerves. She perched on the corner of the kitchen table, linking her hands together and clasping them over one thin knee, whilst Nicola fed Cindy and Tessa, the Afghan hound. "Just because I'm not clamping mangolds?"

"It's a good thing you're not in charge of clamping mangolds, we'd all starve," said Nicola ferociously.

"I might end up in charge of clamping mangolds," said Lawrie perversely. "I might go into politics. Lots of Muggle actresses do." She looked from the cat to the dog to Nicola. "What are you doing here, anyway? You're not supposed to be here. You're supposed to be..."

"Keeping _your_ alibi up?" suggested Nicola nicely.

"On your honeymoon. Well, _my_ honeymoon, if everyone had their own, but I don't begrudge it," said Lawrie magnanimously. She flopped bonelessly backwards and lay on the table, legs limply dangling, arms folded over her chest like a proper corpse.

"Yes, and that's another thing, you could have warned me about the exclusive you'd allegedly promised that dreadful Natalie Hart person from Witch Weekly in return for the loan of the villa in Greece."

"You didn't go _believing_ that old line, did you?"

Nicola glared down at her recumbent sister. "You mean I didn't have to put up with her sitting at the top table? I thought that model of Quick-Quotes Quill went out with Rita Skeeter. _I'm a thoroughly modern chick, giggled the happy bride, patting at the veil that floated like a halo around her trademark blonde tresses, but I always wanted a big white wizarding wedding with all the trimmings. I only wish my bestest buds Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley could have been here to see it._" Nicola scowled. "_Bestest buds_. It sounds like something Snape would tell us to crush to a fine pulp and simmer for five minutes, and only mention that they exude poisonous goo once Neville's hands have fallen off at the wrists. That or something you'd buy in a head shop."

"Poor Nick," said Lawrie lightly. "What did you actually say?"

"Well, she got _...ing wedding_ right," said Nicola darkly. "Yes, all right, cat, milk is on its way... get your nose out of it, Tessa... After that I pushed her off onto Gilderoy and he started up about believing in a fair deal for Magical Creatures, which is a bit rich for someone who spent years persecuting hags for a living... "

"He never actually did that, he just put Memory Charms on people who did."

"And that makes it any better, does it?"

"_Anyway_," pursued Lawrie doggedly, "you can't be here. You're supposed to be in Greece."

"I _am_ in Greece, or rather you are. I don't know why you keep Polyjuice in your dressing-table, and I don't really want to, but Ginevra remembered it."

Lawrie sat indignantly upright again, arms still crossed, a spectre rising from a grave. "But there's not supposed to be _three_ of us,"

"Kay's first words, so Giles once told me," said Rowan, strolling in and opening the curtains. It was _morning_ out there, an unexpectedly bright morning with a dusting of frost. Sunlight slatted the tiled floor. Nicola twitched her shoulders, feeling that the kitchen was unbearably fusty in the streaming light, last night's cocoa-mugs suddenly insupportable. She stared at Rowan's fair hair instead and wondered whether Lawrie was right about her straightening it. There was definitely _something_ different. "Ro, have you been using Sleekeasy's?"

"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," said Rowan briskly. "Though you might consider that the only bottle of Sleekeasy's in the house dates from Peter's _Honey and Flowers_ period and has a rather distinctive smell, and try to work out the answer from there. Have you two settled which of you is staying and which is going?"

"Not yet," said Nicola, getting some of her own back. "We've only had time to discuss hair and mangolds."

Rowan looked cheerfully uninquisitive. Lawrie looked indignant. Nicola seized the initiative again. "Lawrie steamed in here bleeping about a road-atlas, and since then it's been all _you're not supposed to be here_."

"Now, _Kay_ once told me those were _Giles_ first words... hello, hound." Rowan reached down to scratch at the exact delicate patch of skin behind one ear that was guaranteed to make Tessa a one-woman dog for the duration. "I'm not fooled by an instant by your impression of a starved yet loyal watchdog, you know. Did you tell Lawrie about the wand thing?"

Nicola did so. Lawrie was profoundly indignant. Nine, six, perhaps even three years ago, it would have been windmilling-arms-and-falling-off-the-table outrage; now it just manifested as theatrical spluttering. "My wand? The Ministry are after _my_ wand? Because of _you_ cursing Malcolm Baddock? _Huh_!"

"They should have realised it couldn't be you. You never could Transfigure for toffee," said Nicola, out of a detached desire to know whether she could provoke her sister into falling off the table after all. Lawrie merely grinned. Evidently Transfiguration, like Divination, was one of those things she took pride in being bad at. Nicola, who hated being bad at anything - even Muggle Studies, which everyone knew was an utter waste of time - conceded defeat and returned the grin.

"We look the same again," Lawrie informed Rowan bumptiously.

"So I noticed. Did you get anywhere with the scrying?"

Lawrie went into a long descriptive explanation concerning the sheep and the road-atlas.

"_Feeble_," said Nicola, without much scorn, since everyone in the room including the cat knew that Lawrie was never going to be able to clout sheep on the backside to make them get out of the way and that the sheep wouldn't budge if she did. "I asked the Miss Blakes' Totty to help me get my veil off..."

"I wondered how you did that," said Rowan, setting coffee to brew.

Lawrie jumped, startled by the coffee-maker's throaty, Vespa-like rumble. She bounced to her feet and admired its brushed-steel exterior, hands clasped carefully behind her back. "That's new!"

"Well, yes. Mrs Bertie may be quite happy turning a teaspoonful of Mellow Birds into a mug of undistinguished slop, but I had a small return on an investment, and I thought, why _should_ Dear Mamma be the only one who invests in little luxuries that no one else in the house can appreciate?"

"You do swank, Rowan," said Nicola half admiringly. "Are there any _more_ little dividends on the way?"

"No, there aren't," said Rowan, looking suddenly tired, and with plain overtones of _and if there were I wouldn't waste them on undeserving you_. "What about Totty?"

"Well, _she_ says there's been wizards in and out of Miss Culver's pigeon-house."

"The Great Dovecote, I believe it's known as, properly." Rowan frowned. "Though it _looks_ like an outsized beehive, if I remember right. It's a long time since I've been to Monk's Culvery."

"I've never been." Lawrie crept up on Nicola.

Nicola slapped an indignant hand to the nape of her neck. "What are you doing? Pull your own hair out, if you have to pull anyone's, and you needn't think I'm shaving my head to match you."

"I had a thunk!" Lawrie crowed, clasping her hands over her head boxer-style. "If I Polyjuice myself to look like you, I'll be able to act _and_ sing, so sker_wash_!"

"You are the most..."

"Oh, be quiet, both of you," Rowan frowned. The smell of coffee filled the kitchen, rich and strong. "Nick, are you sure about this?"

Nicola nodded.

"And how long do you think you can bear to leave Patroklos with Ginevra Weasley? Bearing in mind - sorry, Nick - that he's always been prone to get fascinated with people, and blow to anyone else's hurt feelings."

Nicola felt abruptly flat and beaten inside, like long grass after rain. To her bruised surprise, what hurt most was that _Rowan_ thought _Ginevra Weasley_ was the sort of person who might fascinate Patroklos. She opened her mouth to say something, but was pre-empted by Lawrie, who said in the most cheery, everyday tone of voice possible, "More likely he'd shy away from anyone called Gin like grim death, if you want my opinion."

Rowan passed Nicola a cup of coffee. Nicola sipped it and carefully didn't think the bruised thoughts, and they retreated back into the part of her head they customarily inhabited, where she didn't look.

"Fob rang at five to say Peter was just the same and so were the Flobberworms. I don't like leaving her with them any longer than I have to," said Rowan with a frown. "I suppose I can distract Maudie Culver with a copy of the Parish Magazine or something whilst one or both of you try and get into the dovecote. It's a good thing you're both small." She reached down to stroke Cindy, who was slinking by on her way somewhere, probably off to roost in the warm, forbidden airing-cupboard. "Percy's hardly what the Americans would call the quarterback type, but I doubt he'd fit."

"Percy? Percy _Weasley_?" said Nicola blankly.

Lawrie shot her a look that was pregnant with intrigue, causing Nicola to docket Percy as part of Lawrie's byzantine plans and dismiss him. He'd probably been roped in by Ginny, though she'd always thought they didn't get on. Then again, maybe the not-getting-on was mostly stacked up on Ginny's side. She vaguely remembered coming round in the cold infirmary after the events of her second year and seeing a hunched, scholarly back in a hand-me-down robe and a blaze of red hair by Ginny's bed; which was particularly surprising considering that Percy's girlfriend was lying two beds over to the left. Ginny herself had been irritatingly flat-voiced and washed out when she woke up and irritatingly bouncy the next term, and not, in Nicola's opinion, deserving of _any_ brother, not even a starched-up prefectly one who was forever telling people off for running in corridors.

Nicola squared her shoulders. The coffee ran down her throat like chocolatey-bitter nectar, too hot, but still exactly what was needed. "Patroklos isn't going to go off and get fascinated with Ginevra Weasley. He's my _husband_. And she's not that interesting, anyway," said Nicola. "I'm in this up to my neck already. I may as well stay."

"You mean you can't find it in yourself to swan off to a Greek island and leave us up to _our_ necks," said Rowan, sounding unwillingly exasperated. "You are a dutiful type, you know."

"Dutiful?" said Nicola, immensely offended. "Like _Ann?_"

Rowan shrugged. "If it was me I'd be drinking perfectly dreadful wine by the bucketful and watching the sun set over the olive groves, and not giving a _thought_ to what was going on meanwhile, back at the ranch."

Nicola looked at her doubtfully. "_Really_, Ro?"

"Really." Rowan strode over to the window and shoved her hands into her pockets. She looked out at the dark furrowed fields and the pale lemon sky; at the low distant rise of the hills, saddled with trees. There were sheep in the road, grey-brown and obstinate, getting in each others way and failing understand that they were supposed to to go through the lichen-yellow gate they went through every day of their lives; and a rime of frost on the ground. Rowan stretched, her shoulders and back curving like a cat's. "I'd turn my back on this whole beleaguered cluster of islands if offered anything resembling a chance. It's only a matter of time before the other wizarding nations realise what's going on and invade us; or realise what's going on and make their peace with the Ministry, and I honestly couldn't tell you which is likely to be worse."

Nicola watched her uncertainly. Anything she said was liable to sound trite; and most of what she was thinking was along the lines of _we were all expecting Harry Potter to save us and I don't know whether he even tried_. Which would sound quite ridiculous if she said it. It would be like saying that they'd all cheerfully lumbered the burden of saving the world onto the shoulders of Miranda or Susan or somebody. Or _Lawrie_. Or that dim wet drip Marie Dobson, dead five years ago in a piece of routine mismanagement during the Triwizard Tournament, and not given the most cursory thought by anyone since.

The coffee-cup was burning her fingers. She put it hastily down, slopping a little into the saucer.

"Well, _I_ don't want to go on your honeymoon," said Lawrie magnanimously. "Besides, I have a Plan for dealing with Vincent."

"Forewarned is forearmed," said Rowan meaningfully; but plainly, there was nothing to be got out of Lawrie that morning besides smug shakes of the head and irritating hints; and equally plainly, trying to get any more about the Plan out of her would only be seen as encouragement.

\--

"That was a really unpleasant place to hide a Portkey, and just like Vincent Crabbe," said Percy fastidiously, wiping guano off his fingers with a clean but threadbare handkerchief. "Ah... where are we?"

"Vincent's Base, one supposes." Rowan looked around, her eyes adjusting to the gloom. Wherever they were, it was built on a scale that put Trennels firmly in its place as the outsized farmhouse it was. They appeared to be standing in a fireplace. It was wide and high enough for all of them to stand comfortably, and the grate came up to Lawrie's knees. In front of them, panelled flooring rolled away into a beeswax-scented darkness, dimly populated with portraits and suits of armour and the high arch of a particularly fine hammerbeam roof.

"We're not back at _Hogwarts_, are we?" asked Lawrie in a hushed whisper.

"Honestly, Lal, if Dumbledore didn't close that loophole about _no Apparating on the premises but do, please bring all the Portkeys you care to lift_ after our fourth year, he was... well, he was a twinkly-eyed old loon with a thing about sherbet lemons, but that's not the point," said Nicola, sounding bothered. "It doesn't _smell_ like Hogwarts."

"It doesn't smell like Crabbe, either, he must finally have taken to washing his socks," retorted Lawrie pertly. "I say, look at that lady over there in the portrait, the one in the ruff. She's the living spit of Ann."

The portrait made a sweetly understanding face and raised a finger to its lips, not without some difficulty, considering that the ruff was the size of a small county. Nicola turned her back on it.

"Hush," said Rowan, bending to examine the wards on the grate. She waved her wand and murmured something. Green and purple runes danced palely in the air. "It's going to take a few moments to get rid of these... Percy, give me a hand. I've never been sorrier I don't have a NEWT to my name,"

She looked up. Percy was pushing his glasses up his nose and looking even paler and primmer about the mouth than usual. "I... ah... I'm almost certain I know where we are," he said. "I've been here on Ministry business."

"Milk quotas?" suggested Rowan, quirking a grin up at him.

"No," Percy's Adam's apple bobbed convulsively as he swallowed. "No. Ah... nothing at all to do with milk quotas at all."


	11. Chapter 11

"_I_ know where we are," said Lawrie bumptiously. "I remember it from when Lucius Malfoy threatened to sue us because of the sets for _Could He Forgive Her?_ You wouldn't believe the trouble we had with the trap door that was supposed to be the secret compartment under the drawing-room floor. They'd had a six-foot-three conjuror doing three shows daily on that stage all summer, and there must have been more lubricating spells flying around in there than in the Gryffindor boys' showers after the last Quidditch match of the season."

Percy pushed his spectacles up his nose. "Whilst I, as soon as I could, availed myself of the Prefects' bathroom, I..."

"She doesn't mean half of it," said Rowan. "Are the pair of you trying to tell me we're in Malfoy Manor?"

Lawrie nodded, the frost-blonde tips of her hair bobbing. "And just right for the play, too. Too, too, deliriously Victorian."

"Down to the man-traps and the curses on the piano legs, I shouldn't wonder," said Nicola, deciding firmly once and for all that _her_ taste ran to Swedish modern, thank you very much; a decision made much easier by the room containing no seascapes or pictures of ships. "What would Vincent and his snotty little minions be doing here?"

"_There_," Rowan tapped her wand lightly against the grate. "Step over it carefully. _Carefully_, I said, Lawrie. Honestly, I'd have thought you'd have grown out of waving your legs about like a demented spider by now."

"Lawrie, the Arachnoid Freak of Nature," said Nicola idly. She clambered out of the grate with her usual tidy economy of movement. Percy put out his hand, palm up, for Rowan to take as she stepped over. On most people, Nicola thought, the gesture would have looked shame-makingly ridiculous - like something Gilderoy Lockhart would come up with - but for some reason in this panelled and fusty setting, from Percy, it fitted. Rowan raised both pale eyebrows and looked, as she sometimes did, as if she were silently and internally laughing at herself. She put her hand in Percy's as she stepped over the grate. It lay against his like snow.

"This is the _third_ best receiving room, leddies and gentlemen, _as_ used by the late Mr Malfoy Senior for giving audiences to Ministry officials, political candidates, his wine merchant and applicants for the post of butler," intoned Lawrie in tour-guide tones with appropriately stilted gestures. "On your left you will see a dual portrait of Faustina Malfoy and her sister Vindemiatrix, who married into the Roman gentry and was known for her close personal relationship with His Holiness the Pope - everyone wave to her, it makes her feel at home - and on your right is a particularly fine example of an Early English gable-backed wossname."

"It's an aumbry," said Percy. "And actually, I think it's the fourth best receiving room."

"Sounds about right for Vincent," said Nicola, shifting from foot to foot with tense boredom. If they had to go and confront Vincent, she wanted to get on and do it; and whilst, unlike Lawrie, she had the sort of stoic courage that meant she could bear to make progress inch by careful inch through the Manor's rooms whilst her elders detected and disabled magical traps, it still twisted her nerves to think about it.

Neither the fourth best receiving room or any of the rooms on that floor yielded anything more than some inventively cursed fly-paper and a chest full of Quidditch robes with peculiar squared-off necklines and puffed, slashed sleeves which ballooned into horrible life and skied two cold spectral Bludgers straight at Nicola with a ferocity that not even Giles could have bettered before Percy managed to deflate them. The attics were similarly unhelpful though some of their contents made Nicola feel sick. She rested a hand on the black lacquered rail of the stairs down out of the attics. It purred under her palm. Nicola snatched her hand away again and tucked it away against her shirt.

"Nelson?" said Lawrie, looking interested.

It was on Nicola's mind to ask her why she wasn't being terrified, as Lawrie so often was; she would have thought that the Manor's horribly cobweb-sticky dust-sheets and looming statuary would be just the thing to bring back those baby terrors. She was about to mention it when it occurred to her that Lawrie was clearly regarding all this as a tremendous put-on, a sort of House of Horrors devised by the Malfoys for the amusement of their guests; and that since neither the Bludgers nor the fly-paper had shaken this notion, and Lawrie in this state of mind was much less trouble all round than the other thing, she might as well leave her sister to her illusions.

"I curse you unto the thirteenth generation," hissed a portrait of a cadaverous man with side-whiskers as she brushed past it.

"Job one, nineteen to you too," said Rowan briskly. "Look, Percy, this is ridiculous. Crabbe's not going to be lurking around here amongst the faded first editions, he's going to be somewhere downstairs within an easy amble of the kitchens. So are his Boys, if I know anything about the human young."

The portrait cackled. "Isaiah thirteen, twenty-two to you, young lady, and I wish you joy of it. Serves you right for bringing a Weasley into the house. Carrots sown Weasley a deep root may gette."

They carried on down the stairs. On the next flight the bare steps gave way to tacked-down drugget, and the lacquered rail to plainish wood. Percy looked agonised. "I believe that was Lesath Malfoy,"

Lesath Malfoy meant nothing to Nicola, and from the look on Percy's face she didn't want it to either, not until she was a long way away from here. Rowan frowned and shoved her hands into her pockets. "Isaiah thirteen, twenty-two. _And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged._"

"You mean Draco's still _around_ somewhere?" said Lawrie, sounding more put out than anything else; which struck Nicola as odd, though she didn't see any point in pursuing it. Whilst she had no special reason to wish Draco Malfoy dead, she had no special reason to quarrel with a universe in which he _was_ dead, either; and if he happened to have become a ghost, she felt morally certain that he would have flitted off to attempt to torment Harry Potter for the rest of his days, probably with utterly fruitless attempts to inspire him with guilt, since neither of them had ever understood the other a scrap. Supposing Harry Potter was still mortal himself, which was by no means certain.

Nicola thought that that was the difference between them, that the one thing Harry certainly _wouldn't_ do if he found himself suddenly incorporeal would be to bother tormenting Draco Malfoy. Or then again, she thought, feeling as if she had stubbed her toe on something, perhaps he would, but only if he was absolutely certain people would see the effects he'd had on Draco and laugh at them.

"If this is a pleasant palace I'd hate to see an unpleasant one," she said finally, deciding as she always did that trying to untangle other peoples' motives in her head was basically a waste of time.

Pine and drugget gave way to carved mahogany balusters and a carpet of some kind of yielding hide that made Nicola pick her feet up dislikingly, and then to pine and drugget again. The staircase ended abruptly in a rather pleasant-looking room with chintz curtains and a cheerful patterned carpet. A small television stood on a plant-stand in the corner. There was a round tatted lace thing weighted with glass beads on top of the television, and a doll in Welsh national costume on top of that. More dolls, dressed as beefeaters and flamenco dancers, were neatly arranged on a shelf.

"Vincent getting in touch with his feminine side?" said Lawrie doubtfully.

"If Vincent has a feminine side it's probably Millicent Bulstrode, and Rose turned her into a Flobberworm," said Nicola.

"Far more likely Lucius Malfoy found that if he wanted to keep servants in this day and age he had to make an effort," said Rowan, tapping her wand against various pieces of overstuffed furniture with antimacassars hanging over the back. "I'd always thought of them as house-elf people, myself, when I gave them any consideration at all, which admittedly wasn't often. He still made her walk round the edge of her own room to spare the carpet, though. Look at the way it's worn."

Nicola looked down at her feet. She noticed something glinting against the carpet, and bent to pick it up. It was translucent and faintly greenish, and shield-shaped, and slightly more pliant than glass; part of some piece of costume jewellery, she thought, slipping it into her pocket.

"He _did_ apply to the House-Elf Relocation Office, but... Hello, what's this?" Percy fished something up from the side of the sofa.

"Polly Abbott's reading glasses," said Rowan resignedly. "Well, at least we know there wasn't some kind of Switching Charm on the Portkey. We're in the right place."

"I don't think you can do that with Portkeys."

"If _I_ was running a nest of Death Eaters, I'd make Portkeys to any number of undesirable places and train all my little brutes and demons to pick the right one," said Rowan grimly. Nicola, who hadn't thought of that, had a nasty shifting feeling in her stomach. "What's through here? Bedroom?"

There was a bedroom, with an equally overstuffed bed and a windowsill full of potted plants. Another doll reposed, glassy-eyed, on the pillow shams. Beyond that there was nothing but a linen-cupboard in which they found a nasty trove of apple-cores and prewar Chocolate Frog wrappers. "Baddock," said Nicola, wrinkling her nose. "And I'd like to know where they got Chocolate Frogs, either. Little beasts."

Rowan stirred aside a stained Famous Wizards card with her foot. "Romeo Coates," she said in an amused tone of voice, and then, her voice gone suddenly flat and small, "Where's Lawrie?"

They all looked round. Lawrie was gone. Backtracking as far as the sitting-room only revealed that she wasn't there either.

"If this isn't just _like_ Lawrie," said Rowan with a sort of muted fury that was much more alarming than anyone else in the family in a full-out bate.

"She does do mad things sometimes when she's scared," said Nicola in a doubtful, exculpatory tone of voice. "You remember that time she summoned the Knight Bus that summer there was trouble with the drains, and then she stood in the middle of the road waving her arms to make it stop and it knocked her over, and the next thing any of us knew she was at St Mungos and they thought she was me?"

"No, thankfully I do not. That was strictly your and Peter and Gin's caper."

Nicola wrinkled her nose at her. "Lower decks stuff?"

"Practically bilges," said Rowan. Nicola was suddenly, hotly aware that Rowan was looking at _Percy_ and smiling, and that the family joke she had conjured up to try to break the moment had alchemically changed into a joke between third eldest siblings at the expense of their youngers. Which was, Nicola thought, a _horrible_ thing to happen, though she couldn't think, afterwards, why she should have minded so much.

"She's probably just decided she's not playing any more and gone back upstairs to wait in the fireplace," said Rowan firmly; which sounded so _like_ Lawrie's idea of being prudent that Nicola found herself more or less able to believe it. "What's through this other door?"

Percy opened the door.

There was a slithering sound outside, a sound that transported Nicola abruptly back to the raw cold autumn of her second year at school. _Not again_, Nicola thought, looking desperately anywhere but the doorway as she reached for her wand, _never again_...

There was a shatteringly loud noise and a smell that Nicola associated with rifle ranges rather than either chintz sitting-rooms or anything involving huge snakes. "Damn," said Rowan very softly.

"Impedimenta!" shouted Percy, and then, more desperately, "Serpengami!"

"Won't work," said Vincent Crabbe.

Nicola looked round, feeling itchily out of patience with herself for being so foolish. So there was some kind of snake in the doorway . It hadn't petrified Rowan, or Percy either, and... and _other_ people, Ginevra Weasley for one, didn't seem to have any after-effects from the business in their second year, it really was too Ginty-like for words to still behave as if she was twelve years old about it...

She forced herself to look at the doorway. Nelson's ghost, but that was a big snake, though. Not anything on the scale of the Basilisk - anyway, Nicola scolded herself, it wasn't as if a Basilisk could fit into this part of the Manor, the doors weren't big enough - but certainly big enough to give anyone a nasty shock if they met it on a landing in the dark. It was rubbing its horned head lovingly against Vincent's robes. The bulk of the snake coiled backwards into a cavernous kitchen.

Vincent was smiling. "You didn't think that Muggle pop-gun would work, did you?" he asked easily, shaking his head. "Nor the old Impediment Jinx or the Snake-Knotting Charm, neither. Still, you've done half my work for me, coming here, though I could wish you'd brought the eldest brother instead of a useless bloody Weasley. If you want old clothes or somethin', Weasley, you ought to of come round the servants' entrance."

Nicola grasped her wand tightly. "What have you done to Peter?"

"Nothin' he won't wake up from. You're very lucky it took me this long to get to you. Never saw it before. Don't know why, considerin' I went all the way through Hogwarts in the same year as two of you. _An'_ spent more time than I should starin' at a picture of your Ginty in the bath. I dunno who gave her the key to the Prefects' bathroom, but they did me a favour." Vincent gave a horrible, crocodilian grin. "The first few bastards I found I killed - half of 'em were Squibs anyway - but the Ministry take a _bit_ of notice of that kind of thing, even these days, and I didn't want 'em poking their noses in."

It took Nicola a long sliding moment to realise that when Vincent said _bastards_ he wasn't just being habitually foul-mouthed. "Honestly, I think you must be _cracked_," she said robustly. "You're not seriously suggesting we're _Malfoys_, are you?"

"Well, you don't have to be," said Vincent equably. "You just step this way and I'll _Kallikakare_ you, and then you can be on your way. There's still a bit of a chance one or two out of the eight of you might be wizards anyway, even just off your mum's side of the family. You should hear some of the things I've heard about your nan."

Percy took a step forward. "Vincent Crabbe, I arrest you for the murder of Muphrid O'Callaghan of the Genealogical Magics Office," he said steadily. "I should have known something was wrong when he disappeared with all his research."

"I never murdered him. He's living a perfectly normal Muggle life in Middlesbrough these days and running a corner shop, and I don't see how you can touch me under wizarding law for not murderin' a Muggle."

"He was _born_ a wizard, and under the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy of 1692..."

"Oh, put a sock in it," Vincent advised him jovially. "Who's going to be the first to come and get themselves genetically cleansed? You too, Weasley. I was always a bit suspicious of the way they used to go on about how your mum was a bit porky. I'm just protecting my rights." A vein started to bulge in his large neck. "I _worked_ for this. I'm no one's thug, not any more. No more _you just walk down that corridor and see if it's cursed, Crabbe_. No more _you stand outside the Gryffindor Tower all night in the rain with this Extendable Ear pinned to the upstairs window and see whether Potter says anything incriminating_." His enormous hand made a downward slicing motion. "Not any more! And like I said, there's always the chance you'll still be witches at the end of it."

Nicola's thoughts were just racing towards the tunnel of _and would it be that bad if I wasn't_ and not knowing quite what they'd find at the end; when Vincent added in exactly the same tone of voice. "O' course, I'm going to need one of you to feed the snake."

Nicola very nearly said _what, put a bowl of dog food down for it or something?_ when she realised he hadn't meant that at all.

"Oh, my God," said Rowan, who went to church at Easter and irregular intervals in between and kept any relationship with God she might have had entirely to herself. "Polly Abbott."

"Not enough meat on her bones," said Vincent, grinning horribly.

There was another explosion of spells. Everyone seemed to be waving their wands and shouting at once. At the end of it the air was full of a purplish-pink haze that smelt perplexingly of cough syrup, and Vincent was still standing in the doorway.

"Naginata, I call 'im," said Vincent lovingly, reaching down to stroke the serpent's horned head. "After 'is mum, mostly, but also cos of the oldest wizardin' trick in the book. Staff to snake. And back again." He whispered something. The words boomed as he spoke them, as if they were exploding with their own sound rather than being made by his breath. Afterwards, none of them could seem to remember what language he had spoken, though Rowan thought it might have been Hebrew and Percy was reminded of what his eldest brother had said about Ancient Egyptian.

Naginata flowed upwards into Vincent's hands. The air flared with light. At the end of it Vincent was holding a long staff with a snake's head. Its horns flared backwards; its eyes glowed greenly in its vicious head. All around the air crackled stiffly with steel-dark power, making a shape like filings around a magnet. Vincent's robes, and the cheery wallpaper, and the kitchen beyond all looked distorted.

"Like I said," Vincent took a heavy step forward. "Who's first?"

Behind them, there were footsteps in the kitchen. Nicola turned her head sharply to look. Faintly through the smoke and haze, she could see a fair head proudly tilted and a general air of whip-thin viciousness.

"What do you think you're doing, Crabbe?" asked a familiar voice, with a sneer that Nicola recognised as she had never done before as a not-bad copy of the vocal inflections of Severus Snape.

Panic showed in Vincent's eyes. The vein in his neck throbbed. His hands clenched on the serpent staff. One of his knuckles popped. "I ain't... I ain't doin' nothin..."

"I'll make you _pay_ for this, Crabbe," whispered the voice. "_I'm_ going to make you pay for what you tried to do. You really think you could kill me? Professor Snape taught me to put a stopper in death in my _first_ year. I'm going to make you pay for the rest of your life, you miserable, snivelling..."

Vincent turned his huge back on Rowan, Percy and Nicola. His shoulders hunched forwards like protective mountains. "I ain't afraid of you! You're dead!"

"_You're_ dead, Crabbe. I mean, you'll wish you were dead, long before I'm done with you."

"You can't touch me! I've got magics you never even thought of!" shouted Crabbe desperately. And then, in a completely different tone of voice, "Hang on a bloody minute... _you're_ not..."

"Finite incantatem," said Percy with a flick of his wand. Nicola felt the magics around Crabbe disperse and then settle again. She lifted her wand and shouted along with him, louder and louder. "Finite incantatem! Finite incantatem!"

Rowan settled her weight, lifted one of the antique guns in her hands, sighted along the barrel as if she was shooting crows from the harvest, and shot Vincent in the back.

Vincent fell to his knees with a colossal percussive thump. There was an imploding sound as Naginata swelled back to its former size. It hissed indignantly. It looked its master full in the eye. Its scales made a clicking, swishing sound against the holystoned floor as it grew. Its eyes reflected the sunlight dully, like moonstones. It opened its mouth and flicked its tongue to and fro.

The head turned towards Vincent. The tongue flicked again, scenting blood in the air. Naginata dislocated its jaw and began to creep forward.

"Time to go," said Rowan firmly. "Come _along_, Lawrie,"

Lawrie paused in the doorway, still flown with her triumph and shaking off the last remnants of pretence that she was Draco Malfoy. "Cor, I wouldn't want to be Malfoy... he was scared, inside, of _everything_..."

All of them, even Percy, stared at her, wondering whether Lawrie had managed to live nineteen years and not notice that _she_ was scared of everything too. Perhaps, Nicola thought, Lawrie's being scared of everything was further from the centre of Lawrie than anyone had suspected; but she was tired, and it was an unprofitable line of thought, so she stopped thinking it and concentrated on climbing the stairs.

\--

"What on _earth_ is going on?" asked Lawrie in scandalised tones, looking at the two Miss Blakes dancing with a young wizard in Decontamination Squad robes in front of the village shop. Owls scudded through the air. A tiny wizard in apple-green and an enormous hat who none of them ever remembered seeing before was running round blowing on a kazoo and hugging people.

"Harry Potter's defeated You-Know-Who," said her sister Karen, who was showing no signs of having been a Flobberworm beyond a still slightly reticulated neck.

Lawrie looked outraged, having been half-way to believing that the celebrations were all for her. "So Harry Potter was still alive?"

"Apparently."

"And... and You-Know-Who was... well, not _alive_, but still around?"

"Apparently," said Karen again, collaring Rose who was going by with a tray of sandwiches. "Did Totty make those? I'm afraid quite half of them will be mushroom preserve and some of the rest are frog..."

"And the Ministry have issued all kinds of very hasty self-denying ordinances saying they were _gravely misled_." Peter wandered over, still looking longer-nosed and darker-complected than he should, but with his arm round the waist of a young witch in crimson velvet. Fob was sitting by the horse-trough glaring at both of them. "And they've declared a national holiday tomorrow. Butterbeer to flow from all taps in wizarding households between 7 am and 10 am, and permission to conjure unlimited bunting."

"Lawrie." Susan wandered over, looking as usual neat and unobtrusive and entirely Susan-like. She seemed to have just extricated herself from a conversation with Ann. Lawrie wondered what on _earth_ they could have had to talk about. "Can I have a word?"

Over teacups in the village teashop, which was generally a dusty and resented annexe to the shop's main business of selling milk and bread to locals and overpriced postcards to visitors, Susan looked worriedly at Lawrie. "I'm really sorry I couldn't say anything. I wanted to. But the others thought... I mean, you weren't DA..."

"Tim would have hated it if I was," said Lawrie simply.

If Susan hadn't been Susan, she might have winced. "Well. Yes. What I meant to say, is..." She reached out and captured Lawrie's hand with her own. "Do you mind? I mean, mind awfully?"

"About Harry Potter?"

"About _Luna_. Everyone thinks it was really brave of you... getting your girlfriend to safety..."

"She wasn't my girlfriend," said Lawrie, licking the jam neatly off the rather small uninteresting cakes that the teashop provided.

Susan let her hand go. "What?"

"She was Cho Chang's girlfriend," said Lawrie smugly. "And now she's off wandering round the Pyrenees looking for Butterbeer-drinking cults or holes into the Hollow Earth or something..." Lawrie drew circles on her plate with her finger, moving the crumbs. "Well, since you were DA together, how about giving me Cho's number?"

\--

"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Nicola as she stepped out of the last, cauldron-hot remains of the Greek day and into the cool of the bedroom. "They're perfectly in proportion."

"They're peculiar and flabby-looking, and they can't be _supposed_ to be that big."

Nicola stood in the doorway and looked at him; at the surprising, moonlit-silvered length of his body under the thin sheet, the heartbreaking small curve of his hip. She put the jug of wine down on the table. "They're _feet_. Perfectly good feet, as feet go."

"Well, two of mine just went. Along with at least two-thirds of my body mass. I can't imagine how rabbit animagi and the like manage."

A soft bubble of happiness broke in the back of Nicola's throat, like the memory of champagne. "I imagine they manage. Just one question," she asked as she crossed the room towards the bed. "Are you a _registered_ Animagus?"

"Oh, yes," he drawled sweetly. "I'm _fearfully_ law-abiding like that."

And the moonlight streamed through the window, and he opened his arms to her.


End file.
